


Bad Loves Company

by Opacifica



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood and Violence, Epilogue Typical Transphobia, Happy Ending?, Implied/Referenced Gore, John's Anime Dreams, John's Retcon Powers, Literal Fuckery?, M/M, Metanarrative Fuckery, No Gods No Masters Only First Person Narration, Parallel to The Homestuck Epilogues: Candy, Rosebot Is There, Slow Burn, The Homestuck Epilogues, Two Trainwrecks In Motion, Unhealthy Kismesissitude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2020-10-18 17:41:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20643113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: Two omniscient bros with debilitating depression, sitting between realities, five feet apart because we haven't reached that part of the narrative yet. Keep a tight grip on the bridles of your metaphorical horses. I'm working up to it.(Dirk is tired. Haven't you ever wanted to let someone make the tough choices for you?)





	1. Where there's a will, there's a wake.

The quality of the static scenery is oddly gouache, unfinished, distant shapes fading and blurring into each other with irregular shade and light. If I had to put my entirely speculative un-finger on a post-impressionist’s technique to stylistically describe the shit going down in the middle distance, it would probably be a Cézanne painted over by an epileptic toddler with a watercolor set missing every color but murky yellow and blue, for some fucking reason.

Looking out at it for too long is dizzying, but looking down at myself isn’t much better. I’m oddly hazy, because he hasn’t noticed my presence here yet, which really diminishes the quality of my lineart.

John is dreaming in anime again, and per the usual level of metaphysical competence exhibited by literally anyone who isn’t me - it’s hardly vainglory if it’s objectively _true_ \- he’s doing a shit job of it.

He watches as distant figures flicker across the tangle of nauseating colors.

Despite the actual visual assault of his artistically amateurish subconscious, it’s peaceful here. I can see the allure of this kind of existence, frankly, or I wouldn’t bother hanging around in this backwater pseudonarrative in my copious free time. Really, I get it. The total meaninglessness of it. Not giving a fuck is a luxury I can’t currently afford in reality proper, but this depressed piece of shit is practically swimming in it. John can’t even muster up the sense of purpose necessary to pay his dream-animators a living wage. They’re unionizing in his fucking cerebellum, organizing a John’s Stupid Dreams boycott on Twitter, the hashtag is trending and the picket line is singing a Pete Seeger lineup and conspiring with the IWW and he’s just out here sitting on a poorly drawn rock watching an effigy of Lord English tear through an indistinct army of his doomed friends, completely unperturbed.

I clear my throat.

He doesn’t look up, so I do it again.

John flinches like he’s seen a ghost. I can’t really blame the guy. If my math is right, and it is, the version of me that he knows wrecked his shit less than a few hours ago. The funeral will be tomorrow. For all those temporal designations mean a goddamn thing.

“Sup,” I say.

“You’re dead,” he replies, with consummate eloquence.

I don’t actually trust my audience to interpret that ironic dialogue tag accurately. If I were trying to describe the tone with which he made a basal yet completely useless observation as to my ‘being alive in his meaningless timeline’ attribute or lack thereof, the descriptor ‘puzzled’ would come to mind, along with a number of less flattering adjectives. I’ll trust my readers when I’m dead and in hell. You need me to spell this shit out for you, like everything else. This isn’t my first fucking rodeo. Get the fuck off the mechanical bull, fix yourself a shitty margarita, and try to keep up.

The bar is pathetically low, but I’ve yet to encounter a group of assholes with a basic grasp of the connection between parseable symbolic depictions of familiar parts of speech and contextually significant vocalizations that couldn’t muster up a few idiots capable of tripping over it. I’ve got to keep this shit locked the fuck down in what ancillary ways I can. 

I don’t make the rules, here.

This isn’t my dream.

I’m just an internarrative tourist. In reality, I’m the God among gods, for now, presiding over a divine assembly of overpowered young adults with the approximate self-deterministic capacity of a flock of pigeons. Here, John is still running what’s left of the show.

Not much, to be clear. I’m slumming it in the filthy cesspool of what remains of any kind of independent will outside of my own universe.

The slack-jawed dipshit who still hasn’t managed to stand up from his watercolor-rock seat is almost definitely the last person who actually could have stopped me.

Frankly, I’m the one who’s seeing a ghost. If John could squint a little harder, if the shapes of his visions weren’t so vague and under-analyzed, he’d see himself getting ripped to pieces out there. The real him. The one that matters to anyone of even marginal importance, the one whose corpse is conveniently stored in Terezi’s appallingly sticky sylladex.

“Sorry,” he says, after a second. “That’s probably really insensitive. My bad. Uh. You’re. Alive?”

I shrug deftly.

“Head still attached last time I checked. Of course, with me, it’s only ever a matter of time.”

As I expected, he doesn’t laugh. Winces, instead, the way you’d anticipate someone might shortly after bearing witness to the scene of a graphic decapitation and immediately enduring a tone-deaf joke about the subject matter.

To clarify, I’m not tone deaf. My pitch is excellent. The effect was intentional.

I glance down, and find that I’ve solidified into a convincing if somewhat stylized depiction of myself. He thinks I’m slimmer than I actually am. My hands, as he remembers them, are smooth and almost disorientingly soft. The effect is classically bishie if I do say so myself.

John and I have never been especially close. I wish I hadn’t been obligated to regard him as such a significant threat, because I truly wouldn’t mind ignoring him completely, permitting him to go about his business as he likes. Left to his own devices, he _probably_ wouldn’t leave the house.

There is possibly some evidence to suggest that I wouldn’t, either, so I can’t really hold that against him.

For his lack of certainty, though, as a potential mitigating factor, and for the bizarre tendency of the narrative to warp around him like some kind of inverted black hole of inexplicable relevance, he had to die. It was part of the story, yes, but at the same time, there are workarounds to most mid-tier unpalatable narrative certainties.

It just would have meant a lot of work for me.

Decency forbid I make something easier on myself.

“Yeah,” he sighs, after an inordinately long pause, face clearing. “Same Dirk.”

“In the anime flesh.”

“Well, uh, make yourself comfortable in my subconscious, I guess. I haven’t really messed around with the mechanics of this stuff much, but I could probably get you a glass of water or something like that if you want?”

“Nah, it’s all good.”

John sighs, a muscle in his jaw tightening as he considers what he actually wants to say to the recently deceased brother-father of his best bro. I can’t tell exactly what he’s brewing up in there, which is almost exciting. To be, perhaps, a touch too real with you for a second, it gets exhausting, knowing literally everything so fucking always.

‘Literally’ is one of those words that’s been overused into near-meaninglessness, or at least forfeiture of its potential utility as a term. Etymologically, ‘literally’ comes from the Latinate ‘littera’, or ‘letter’. One might as well say ‘to the letter’, or ‘textually’, if one was looking to reclaim the symbolic meaning of a really fundamental piece of language, but digging too explicitly into metanarrative concepts in casual conversation has the tragic side effect of scaring the hoes.

I know everything, to the letter.

The everything of it ceases to be absolute when someone else is writing the scene and the wording of it all is partitioned safely within Egbert’s thick skull. I’m actually very excited to see what Rose does with the capacity once I take the tiara off her corpse someday. Nothing about John screams or even subtly indicates a capable writer, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I’m tired.

No harm in admitting that here, where nothing matters.

“Did you talk to Dave, before you..? Uh, if that’s something you know, if you’re… you know,” he finally says.

“I can’t say I did,” I say.

“Oh. That kind of sucks, man. I mean, this all kind of sucks a lot, but especially that, and… wow, I don’t really want to bitch you out, but…“

“I didn’t have to do it,” I concede. “There’s a universe where I don’t.”

“_Oh._.”

“Can you guess what you ate in that one?”

“You can’t blame me for -!”

“I don’t blame you. Blame is a useless concept in a universe in which no one has any kind of causal autonomy. You accepted both, and you accepted neither, and conditionality was fulfilled for the cluster of timelines to progress, and everybody goes home happy, except for a couple of pathetic splinters who went to the top of a bell tower instead. Aren’t you happy, John? You’re all set up to get the girl. Your post-game domestic bliss AU is in the works. Sounds pretty fuckin’ choice by most people’s standards. Not even you should be able to fuck this up.”

He sputters futilely. It took some processing for me to come to terms with it as well.

“How could you do that to Dave?” he demands. “Dude, that’s not… I mean, no matter how many words you say, it’s still… didn’t you fuck him up enough already?”

An expert twist of the knife by one John Egbert, who is not quite as completely useless as he prefers to appear. I can’t entirely bite back a smile. When I’m right, I’m right.

“Tell me to do something,” I say, changing the subject only slightly. “I want you to understand your part in this before you cast aspersions on me.”

“Take off your shades,” he replies, without so much as missing a beat, his brow still creased with disapproval.

Really takes to the spirit of this shit like a fish to fucking water, but the dude’s no savant.

“Not quite,” I tell him. “You’re used to doing this unintentionally. Conscious control is going to take some effort. For now, repeat after me. _I take off my shades_. Try to mean it.”

“I take off my shades,” he says, his frown deepening despite the curious glint to his eyes.

I take off my shades.

“It’s going to take some getting used to,” I say, stilling the shiver that crawls down my spine at the brief feeling of pure weightlessness.

“What the fuck, dude. What the fuck? This is so messed up. Oh my god. This is _so_ messed up.”

“Dave will be fine,” I add. “If you’re worried about him, maybe consider coming through for him even slightly yourself, given that you’re so convinced the poor dude is on the precipice of a breakdown. I know, a lot to ask from the guy who can hardly summon up the narrative agency to make himself take a fucking shower occasionally, but you could try.”

“Hey,” he protests weakly, but he can’t bring himself to argue. I’m right, aren’t I?

“Keep practicing,” I suggest, sliding my shades back atop the bridge of my nose. “You’re punching outside your weight class, for the moment. I gave you that one.”

“Hold the fuck on! Just tell me what’s happening, what did I… what did I do to you?”

“In your universe? Easy. You stopped me. Congratulations.”

“Stopped you from doing what? Dirk!”

“You’re smarter than you let on, John,” I say, leaning in just slightly. “Think it over. And then, wake up. It’s time for my funeral. You’ll have to tell me how it goes.”

He reaches for me. For all this figurative clown has been vegetating, stuck in his own decaying home, for the last five years, he’s still god-tier-fast. So am I, obviously, but I’m not interested in debasing myself with a game of John’s-dream-tag. His hand closes around my shoulder.

“Please,” he says. “Nothing makes sense anymore. It seems like you might actually know what the fuck is happening, and I can’t… I can’t just… you love Roxy, don’t you? Roxy’s acting insane. And so is everybody. I need help. This is only going to get worse, I can feel it.”

I lean in even closer.

“You’re right,” I murmur, millimeters from him, close enough to actually hear his heartrate spike when I say it. “You’re boned, man. Everyone is. And the best part of the whole shitshow is that it’s literally your fault. Not in the diluted sense. Down to the fucking letter. C-A-N-D-Y. I have nothing to do with this clusterfuck. This one’s on you.”

He inhales sharply, but doesn’t pull away. If anything, his grip on my shoulder tightens.

“And that’s all for now. Later, dude,” I tell him, disappearing before he can reply.

...

We’re somewhere in the inky depths of paradox space, this time, or at least, a van Gogh-reminiscent approximation of the scene outside the portholes of my ship. The multidimensionality of simulated freefall is interesting, to say the least. It figures that this is where he’d be the most comfortable.

Beneath us, Earth-C glows like an impressionist’s neon-streaked bad trip.

It looks about as big as a marble from this vantage point. Paradox space is impossibly vast. Any anime-esque facsimile of a recognizable narrative, any characters or storyline that could conceivably be populating the void, are all unreachably distant.

The configuration really should convey a near-rapturous sense of power. John is the last true God of the planet flickering beneath his feet. He even _knows_ it, since I’ve deigned to let him in on our little narrative confidence, and he can remember that, here, in this dreamspace between truths. 

But as the light from his version of the world filters through the inky blackness of the nullity separating him from the pathetic automatons left behind on Earth-C, his expression is completely disaffected.

He’s a goddamned virtuoso when it comes to disconnecting from the people he says he cares about. It’s one of the few things I admire about him even marginally.

“So,” I prompt. “How was it?”

I’ve always figured that the absolute pinnacle of Roxy’s bizarre fixation on mortuary ritual would be planning _my_ funeral specifically. Kind of the best gift I could give him, a timely hara-kiri. I do love that incomprehensible son of a bitch.

“Awful,” he says accusingly, spinning to face me with an unnecessarily dramatic flourish of his god tier cape, which wouldn’t be possible in the vacuum of space if this wasn’t a wind-god’s dream. “It was fucking awful! And I don’t _get it_, how you could just… how could you?”

So we’re back to that old saw. I can’t help but sigh. The expression of any sort of nuance is a lot to expect from someone of John’s mental caliber. Interpreting nuance, even more radically unlikely.

“Still fresh, then.”

“Uh, yeah, dude, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, considering it was _yesterday_!”

“Time isn’t real,” I tell him, despite the fact that there’s absolutely no iteration of any universe where he picks up on what that actually means.

I’ll be honest, here, because I can’t very well be honest traipsing around on my own spaceship with my just-shy-of-omniscient robot daughter and a disturbingly perceptive and clinically depressed teenage troll girl. 

I’m not sure when my tagline became ‘making judgements as to the realness properties or lack thereof inherent to various descriptions of time’. I don’t really give a shit.

For whatever fucking reason, though, it keeps coming up. The problem with the use of words like ‘timeline’ when someone is really trying to describe a ‘narrative’, a mistake as common as it is moronic, is that linear stories are stupid. It’s not that they can’t exist; it’s more that they don’t matter. They contribute nothing of even the most limited interest to the native flow of Time and Space and Being. It just keeps happening?

Groundbreaking.

The mundanity of time leads to some truly brain-meltingly stupid takes on the subject by approximately everyone who has ever given it a try. I can’t explicitly distinguish myself from that number, precisely because I have less than zero interest in picking the issue up for myself. My takes, for now, are as icy-cold as anyone else’s, and the take microwave in my spaceship is currently occupied with ‘literally every more important thing in the multiverse, which is most of them’, which prohibits any potential endeavor to thaw that particular metaphysical hot pocket.

If I did, though, you can bet that shit would be scalding the whole way through.

What was I saying again?

Time isn’t real.

For now, that’s where I draw the line.

“Sure, man, whatever,” John says, turning slowly back to face the faraway planet we mutually created, once.

“Don’t tell me my passing rattled you more than you were expecting,” I say.

“Uh, obviously it did! It _rattled_ everybody so hard that their brains have come loose or something! Everything’s falling apart. I don’t… I don’t even really know why.”

“You absolutely do.”

“Stop saying it’s my fault! How can it be my fault? I don’t _do_ anything!”

“Have you listened to a word I’ve said? Be honest, no hurt feelings on my end, I’m curious whether the disconnect is owed to a deficit in attention span or if you fundamentally lack the cognitive function God gave a salamander.”

“What do you _want_?” he demands, glancing up again to face me, expression more pained than genuinely angry.

“Same as you, if the dream is any indication. Some peace and quiet, mostly,” I say, perhaps more frankly than usual.

He sighs.

“Roxy proposed.”

John gets a limited edition boxed set view of my eyebrows over my shades, here. Sometimes, even knowing the twist - and everything, in general - in advance, the insane bullshit going down in his narrative still hits like a goddamned thunderbolt.

“I know,” he continues, not waiting for me to respond. “I know, I should be… like, uh, I should be really excited. She’s so… um, I mean, she’s great. Like she’s really. Funny. And nice, but not too nice, usually, and… a lot like Dave, I guess. Man, I gotta be careful not to say that in front of Rose.”

“Wow, this is physically painful,” I say. “Tell me you’re writing this shit into your vows.”

He laughs uneasily.

“Come on, dude, what am I supposed to do, say no? To _Roxy_?”

I shrug. I’m probably not the guy to ask about anything Roxy-related, for a growing pile of reasons I’d rather not consider too extensively, thanks.

“That’s what I thought,” he says, huffing out a sigh. “Like you would have handled it so much better.”

“I’ll be real with you, man, been there, done that, and I did, actually. Different circumstances, though.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Well, you have an excuse. You’re all…”

My eyebrow-raising muscles are getting a real workout, and he flushes as he realizes exactly what he’s said, a beat too late to change course.

“All what?”

“You know.”

“Hey, this is your dream. I’m whatever you want me to be. Apparently that’s the elegantly bishounen centerfold of Earth-C Doushinji Monthly, and I’m not fighting it, but you gotta be straight with me, dude. I can’t read your mind, huge loss though that is.”

“Fine! I can’t just tell her I’m _gay_. Because I’m not. I like, I _want_ to - I _did_...”

“First of all, if you’re going to start talking about nailing Roxy, I’m going to have to ask you to mercy kill me first, since hemorrhaging from my ears isn’t the way I want to go. Second, you seriously think that’s the reason I wasn’t hopping on the Roxy train?” I say.

Probably a mistake to bring that dimension into it, but nothing matters here, so I might as well. Whatever Roxy’s deal is, whatever actually makes him _him_, or a him, or whatever the hell, I have to take the word of a shitty skeleton with a would-be god complex that’s frankly pathetic compared to my own with approximately a post-diluvian ocean’s worth of salt.

But that’s the problem with the whole Roxy business. I seriously don’t know what makes him tick, which would bother me (which doesn’t bother me at all, but theoretically would) if he wasn’t one of the people I love most in the world.

It’s probably the most profound compliment I can offer him, that I don’t get his _thing_, that I’ve never been able to account for the way he feels about me (or anything, in a more general way), though honestly, John’s a step up from shitty green skeleton-martinet, so maybe his taste is improving. He’s not stupid. I can’t believe he’s stupid. Just gives too many chances, cuts too much slack, something like that.

Easy to take advantage of. Really easy. But even at my most borderline-sociopathic-teenage-self, I couldn’t take more from him than what he was fucking giving me with both hands. Like the fucker had never heard of game theory, and decided to take it out mercenary-style, machete to the throat, in the form of overabundant and unconditional love.

Or something.

Every time I try to explain it, I come up with something different. I should really stop trying. If he wanted me to know what the fuck was up with him, he’d have told me. He’d have said something. I wouldn’t have had to hear his fuckin’ he-him journey bullshit from a despotic hypocrite of a cherub performing a so-bad-it’s-suicide-inducing two-bit knockoff of _my fucking schtick_.

John is looking at me strangely.

More strangely than usual. He’s not a man of great tact when it comes to expressions, or anything.

“Roxy’s… _what_?”

“Oh, fucking please. He’s _told_ you, what, two separate times about his gender shit? Tried, at least.”

My tone is still even and measured, but I’m actually annoyed enough by the fucking _ignorance_ wafting off this interaction to miss the lede, here, which is that John, when he’s making any effort whatsoever, can hear my thoughts.

Luckily there isn’t much to censor. Less than nothing he could do about any of them - anything I’ve said, anything I’ve done - in any way that matters. And I’ve got nothing to hide.

“What are you talking about?”

“It clearly doesn’t matter. Your dream, your rules, your fiancee. Mazel.”

“Everybody wonders about that stuff,” he says, frowning deeply. “You know. All that kind of thing. It’s… it’s a what-if kind of scenario. Right? I figured that was what it was.”

I look away, halfway back into my corporeal body and a marginally less stupid narrative, when he shakes his head like he’s clearing the cotton-fucking-stuffing out of it and says, “_wait_.”

The command is rough-edged. There are ways to approach this kind of thing with finesse - admittedly, that’s not really my style, either, but this is a hammer to the metaphysical face.

I wait. Suspended in the dreamlike facsimile of paradox space, I stand by as John collects his thoughts.

This, predictably, takes a while.

“I don’t want to fuck Roxy up. You - you know how this ends. How it goes. How can I not… how can I _fix_ this?”

He waits, now, and it's as though an invisible band has loosened from around my chest.

“You can’t,” I say. “You won’t remember this. It isn’t really happening.”

“I know, I _know_ that,” he insists, raking his hand through his hair in agitation.

“Don’t…” I wait again, this time on my own terms. “Don’t let Roxy name your kid after me.”

“What? Okay, seriously, dude, I’m getting a really powerful ‘being fucked with’ vibe here, and it’s kind of not doin’ it for me!”

“I’m serious,” I say, seriously.

See, it’s right there, in the text. Twice.

Silence is absolute in paradox space, and for an achingly long moment, we seem to be at an impasse. Finally, he sighs and gestures an invitation to elaborate.

“It’ll just make things worse,” I continue. “Roxy’s always gotten carried away with that kind of stuff. I don’t want to be complicit in fucking your kid up from beyond the grave.”

“Worse for who?”

_For whom_, I think, but that level of pedantry is beyond the pale, even for me.

“Not just for Egbert Junior. For both of us,” I say instead. “For all of us.”

“Look, it isn’t actually that bad, anyway. I mean, now that I really think about it - aren’t you the one who said I should just, like, be happy with this stuff? I’m getting married. That’s one of the first steps to dadliness, and, fuck, I mean, is Roxy…? Can you tell? This doesn’t just sound like a hypothetical, dude. And how else am I supposed to live up to... literally, you _said_...”

He trails off.

My speech on the subject was indeed _literally_ so, but my meaning was, as the kids say, ironic. John won’t be happy with anything. There aren’t many people sufficiently practiced at self-imposed isolation and masochistic-or-just-stupid denial of their own suffering to descend into debilitating depression on a paradise planet, surrounded by their closest friends and a sprawling, economically unsound nanny-state of mental health resources, but suffice to say, he’s one of them.

“Nice spiel. That’s exactly how healthy relationships start.”

“How would _you_ know?” he shoots back, uncommonly terse, with a flicker of something that reminds me that he’s still something slightly more than a human-shaped sack of meat.

“You got me there,” I concede.

“I’m sorry,” he says, unaccountably.

“Don’t be. Not on my account, anyway. Call it like you see it. I can respect that.”

“No, you’re trying… you’re trying to help me, aren’t you? To not suck. Or to suck less. I’m pretty sure I will anyway, but I… I definitely owe it to Roxy to give it a try. A real try.”

“Noble of you, in a strikingly quixotic way. That windmill ain’t coming down, John. In the spirit of the open-book honesty that we so clearly have going on here.”

I’d pull some kind of older-brother card from one of the hackneyed movies that John loves so much - break Roxy’s heart, I’ll break your narrative - but that kind of dick-measuring shit really wouldn’t be fair to him when I have absolute metanarrative authority over the being-property of all things, including dicks, save for within this tiny sliver of unreality.

He sighs.

“Well, I want to think you’re trying to help, at least, because, not to speak ill of the dead or whatever, but otherwise you’re just leaning into the asshole tough-guy deal for no reason!”

“I have layers, you know,” I complain. “Just because you’re incapable of viewing me in more that one or two dimensions - literally, this fuckin’ dream-art, man - doesn’t mean I’m not complicated.”

“Believe it or not, I wasn’t actually denying that you’re a complicated dude, Dirk. I don’t want to… I don’t want to deny you your personal autonomy or whatever either. Am I keeping you here, somehow? Would you rather be somewhere else? Maybe a dream with better production value, ha ha.”

“Autonomy, huh? Real million dollar word, there, and intriguing concern from the guy playing fast and loose with his narrative jurisdiction in the interest of prolonging a chat about his fiancee.”

He flushes, opens his mouth and closes it again. Of course, I’m a relentless hypocrite myself. But there’s a difference between a surgeon’s scalpel and a fucked-up paradox hammer, and the fact that I’ve been known to overuse the tools of my trade has nothing to do with his blundering lack of self awareness.

“I tried to bring you back.”

That one actually _is_ out of left field.

“What?”

There’s no triumphant smile to clue me in on whether or not _he’s_ fucking with _me_, now.

“I tried. I really tried to retcon you back. It didn’t… work. But I tried. I just want you to know that. I feel kinda shitty about it, actually. It just seemed like you being gone was making everything fall apart. It still is, and I tried to fix it, and it didn’t work, and I’m sorry anyway.”

“I’m the last person anyone should be apologizing to,” I say, furrowing my brow, trying to delve back into the narrative I’ve thumbed through idly, though never really gotten into. The Candy narrative is an aspect of the truth, yes, and like many aspects of the truth, it’s fucking depressing.

I’m not stalling. But I don’t remember what he’s describing, and at least from within the dreamscape, he’s walling me away from his storyline. Again, power move coming from the alleged head of the Society for the Protection of Dirk’s Narrative Autonomy.

Fuck, for all I care, the pages got stuck together and I missed it.

“Do us all a favor, John,” I say. “Move on. Don’t make things weird.”

“_I_ didn’t make anything weird!” he insists. “You’re the one who keeps sticking his fingers in my brain! It’s so fucked, dude, I can feel you _trying_...”

“Take a closer look at your universe if you think that’s even marginally true,” I say, ignoring the rest of that statement.

“Fuck you,” he says. “I don’t need your help. I shouldn’t have tried. I need to stop… I can’t...”

“_Stop_, then,” I tell him. (Easier said than done.) “Go back to your beautiful blushing spouse. Lose my invitation to the wedding of the century in the mail. I’ll be here when you want me.”

I don’t have much of a choice. Some splinter of me will unerringly be present, though the timing is up in the air. But I can choose whether or not to directly inhabit it, to make the few calls John subconsciously leaves for me. If he wants to play dolls, he’s welcome to insist, but he’ll have to get better at exercising his narrative control. In the meantime, I’m bored with this game, and I’m ready to take my ball and go home.

Rose is probably almost done with my laundry.

“I’ll be seeing you,” I tell him.

“No, you won’t,” he insists.

This is an inane hill to die on, so I shrug and disappear. If John were as attuned to the narrative as I am, he’d be able to tell that we have at least four chapters yet to go.

…

You can tell, though, can’t you?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Candy, Page 15](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues/candy/15)


	2. Don't question when it's closing time.

Welcome back.

It’s been a slow series of existentially meaningless temporal units in the spaceship. I won’t bore you with the details. Regardless of whether that’s what you’re here for, you voyeuristic piece of shit. The exactitudes of the strain this existentially vital mission is exerting on my immediate family and our shipguest in the aftermath of our departure from Earth C may well be precisely the kind of shit you get off on, but that’s pretty well-tread ground at this point, from a metanarrative perspective.

Also, hell-bent as you freaks may be on focusing on the ‘languishing in our own misery’ aspect of existence, that’s a downright sociopathic approach to storytelling. I’m not here to wallow in my own misery, since, as a man of action, I don’t fucking do that. I’m here to wallow in _John’s_, and you’re here because you’re into that. Might as well lay it out on the metaphysical table.

Suffice to say, my TripAdvisor review for space road trips with an angsty robot and an angstier troll is not going to be exactly glowing, but it’s not like I was expecting five fucking stars in terms of accommodations, let alone company. I can’t exactly fault Rose for the downturn in sparkling conversation between us. She’s working at resolving some important contradictions in her conception of her self and the actuality of what she’s done by leaving behind her home, her friends, and her planet. That’s exactly as much background as you’re getting.

Obviously, she’ll come to the right conclusion on her own. That this is necessary. That her choice was, at its core, an easy one. Even if she had sincerely made it herself, she would have chosen the same path. I’m fundamentally correct. The evidence is overwhelmingly in my favor. We forfeit the status quo either way. This state of events is qualitatively preferable to the miserable state of affairs in the forks in which I’ve failed. It’s less a matter of distrusting her capacity for logical reasoning and more the necessity of eliminating loose-ends-in-potentia.

She’ll come to see things my way. I’ll let it simmer for now, in lieu of performing any metanarrative robotic arm-twisting. For now, on that front, at least, I can be patient.

That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.

I’ve got other shit to enjoy.

Speaking of pointless bullshit going down outside of our increasingly-canon existence, John, a little older, a little more lined between his eyebrows, and just as miserable as ever, has cordially invited me back into his dreams. Fuckin’ called it. The conduit is open, and I gracefully opt the fuck out from my present state of gazing broodingly into paradox space with the gravitas of a philosopher-king.

Instead, I lean back into the arms of a carved wooden rocking chair, warped slightly by age, but still comfortable. We’re situated on a similarly weathered porch, looking out over what might be a wheat farm, for all I know jack fucking squat about terrestrial agriculture, debatably one of the least relevant topics to anything I’ve ever given a shit about in any iteration of my existence. Admittedly, it’s scenic. Emerald-hued mountains fade into the distance, and the afternoon sun turns the wheat golden without being blinding.

The air smells like the color green.

I wonder where he’s getting this from.

John is seated, hunched awkwardly in his chair, elbows resting on his knees as though he’s deep in thought, which is both as charming and unlikely as those paintings of dogs playing poker. He looks up, briefly, and sighs, more with his expression than anything.

“Rose and Kanaya named their kid Vriska,” he says, by way of greeting.

“Succinct, to the point, meteorically unsettling. Have you been working on your sentence structure? This one genuinely has everything.”

“Fuck off. It’s really messed up.”

“Is it? What did you and Roxy settle on for your kid?”

He goes silent for a moment.

“Well, not Dirk, at least.”

“Sounds like someone’s flexing his subconscious narrative control. I’m so proud.”

“I just wish I could remember this stuff when I wake up. How come I can’t? Don’t just handwave, at least try to break it down for me, if this is just going to keep happening…”

The prospect of explaining this to him, efficaciously or not, isn’t exactly exciting. I decide to give it a try regardless. He’s no Rose - no one is Rose, barely even Rose, yet, as I’ve partitioned her - but this will hopefully be a worthwhile exercise of an explanatory muscle-memory with the potential to rust over with disuse.

I don’t talk to anyone much, lately.

Gotta keep the gears oiled. Easy to forget that I’m one of those wheels within wheels.

“It isn’t actually happening,” I tell him. “This isn’t a dream bubble. Think of this as a metanarrative hallucination instead. The last extratextual gasp of a dying universe. My presence imparts a measure of my existence-property, and a connection between your decaying narrative and canon, and for a brief, glorious moment, you occupy a space in a universe that matters, as your self. It just happens to be anathema to your own independent existence, an irreconcilable contradiction in significance, as your narrative is, by its nature, irrelevant. I can sustain the contradiction. But you’ll recall that I removed myself from your native narrative. The guy that’s six feet under in a wreath of shitty swords isn’t sustaining shit. So you forget, because when one pillar of canon is forfeit - in this case, ‘relevance’ to the alpha narrative - ‘truth’ and ‘essentiality’ properties similarly undergo rapid decay. Our interactions forfeit not only their relevance, but the actuality of their having occurred and their significance in any broader context.”

“Shit, Rose tried to give me this spiel,” he sighs. She certainly did, bless her heart. In one universe, it even worked. “The two of you sure can… talk about this stuff. But, I mean, I definitely… you said I was controlling things? That I did something to Roxy? Because that would really make sense, with how she’s acting about all of this stuff.”

If I could _explain_ the influence that John, totally without intention or direction beyond his own capricious whims, manages to exert on any narrative he inhabits, I wouldn’t have had to kill him.

“You’ve always had a different relationship with the narrative than the rest of us,” I tell him, since I’m already speaking frankly.

“Well, yeah, retcon powers. Changes the rules a lot, I guess.” Then he frowns. “You didn’t kill me.”

“Dude. If I meant ‘retcon powers’, believe it or not, I would have said ‘retcon powers’. I’m specific that way.”

“Fine,” he says. “God, you don’t fucking change.”

“Harsh. Change is a biological fact of us, John.”

“I’m not going to talk to you about this anymore. It’s completely pointless. You’re not going to make sense, since you clearly get off on your super-secret metaphysics game staying incomprehensible, and I’m feeling dicked around with by my own fucking universe right now. Or _whatever_ it’s called.”

He’s not wrong. I nod in polite acknowledgement, but he doesn’t look up to see. I think he can tell, regardless. I couldn’t do anything if he wasn’t so permissive with the substantive material of his subconscious projections, after all.

“That’s valid of you. Why the invite, then? Just dying to tell someone the news? I mean, condolences on your new Serket situation. The fun never ends,” I say, leaning back in my rocking chair with a satisfying creak of aged wood. “The bitch sure doesn’t stop from not being inexistent.”

He’s getting better at dream scenery. The fixtures populating this one feel almost real, only take on the sort of shifting, ephemeral quality suggesting an abstract relationship with existence when I stare too long at the weathered deck or the elaborately carved railing.

“There’s other stuff,” he says. “I can’t really talk to anyone about it, since Roxy just doesn’t process anything Jane does as … horrible, even when it is, and … it feels like going behind her back to be… even with Terezi, since she’s been talking to Karkat again. Karkat and Dave and Jade are their own can of worms, honestly, and topping all that off with Vriska 2: Electric Boogaloo taking up half of Rose and Kanaya’s time... I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t - no. Cut it out. I’m just trying to be an adult about some shit with actual implications for people, and I guess you’re the most convenient avatar to discuss this kind of thing with, since you’re dead and I literally can’t fuck you up worse than something else already did. There, good enough for you?”

“Shockingly self-aware.”

“I’m not actually completely stupid.”

“Your gene pool does make that kind of a crapshoot, you understand. Genetically, you’re at least fifty percent _completely_ stupid, but frankly, you didn’t inherit the ass to make indulging that sort of inanity worth it for the general public, or even really for the people who personally give a shit about you. I can believe that you eventually had to grow out of your own bullshit. Not everyone in your strikingly brunet family unit has had the opportunity.”

“Thanks. I really missed being torn a new asshole every few seconds for no apparent reason.”

Silence pools between us.

He did, though, is the thing. I don’t have to read his mind to know that. It hurts, losing the only leash between you and accountability. Knowing what you could do to the glassy-eyed motherfuckers walking around, too stupid to see what you're capable of, too blind to even see _you_. If Roxy can’t scrape the bottom of the fundamental-character-trait barrel to find an opinion about the name of your child, what could you do to him - what else would he overlook? Or she, or whatever the shit your rapidly-truth-forfeiting effigy of my friend is calling themself.

You wonder about that, don’t you, John.

“I’m not sure what you’re going for, here. Is that… word thing… supposed to do something to me? You don’t really have my narrative voice down, man. Shit, I’m not really sure what my voice even is, lately, but you’re freestyling a whole lot and it kind of doesn’t work.”

I’m pretty sure he does wonder, though.

“_Fine_, maybe. Obviously you’re not interested in the shitshow going on with Jake and Jane, then. God, and Gamzee, I really - that’s really fucking happening, isn’t it, they’re making that happen.”

I lean back contemplatively in my rocking chair, tilting my face up into the afternoon sun. Yeah. It feels real. I wish I’d spent more time enjoying this, before we fucked off to space. There’s something about solid ground beneath me, sun filtering in from overhead, that almost makes me feel like a person. I really can’t underscore enough how much it smells like everything but the endless expanse of Houston’s ocean, here. It’d be peaceful, alone.

Why the hell did he want to talk to me here, then? In the intervening months since he ended our last conversation by thoroughly bitching out, he’s definitely had more boring dreams than this.

“What, I need a reason, now?”

“Entities without independent agency typically do.”

He looks up from his defeated slump. Even in his extranarrative conception of himself, his eyes are pink-rimmed and hooded, his face slightly puffy from lack of sleep. It’s been at least a day since he shaved. That’s definitely a sign of a rough spot. I mean, what would his father think?

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m just curious, John. Flattered, frankly. What’s got me on your mind? Why not text Terezi, really? You’ve talked to her about this sort of thing before. Nothing’s stopping you.”

“Rose mentioned you today.”

“Sounds like something she’d do.”

“We were talking about… well. About Vriska. And you came up, I mean, which makes sense, I guess, with you and her and your whole parallel deal.”

“Hold the fucking phone. My what deal with Serket? We don’t have a deal.”

Which narrative was this asshole reading?

“I knew Vriska better than most people did, I think,” John says, back to putting most of his weight on his elbows, deliberately not looking at me. “You’re basically just as bossy as she ever was, and seriously way worse at admitting when you’re -”

“I can’t even begin to express the magnitude of the shit I don’t give about Vriska Serket. And you’re getting off topic.”

That is, if he was ever _on_.

“Right. Yeah. Rose said - she said she thought you’d want us to move on with our lives without you.”

This would be easier to react to if I could still see his narrative. I know how it’s supposed to go, how I left it. All the most important beats, at least, with the minutiae filed away for reference. He’s been rewriting things, though. Messily, it seems, without much deliberate intent, or he’d have _done_ something with the place, rather than merely propagating his own misery and flipping a few names here and there.

I’ll have to talk to Rose to sort that one out. If that’s what she really thinks, or just another product of Egbert’s psyche unravelling in a dying universe, endlessly and solipsistically justifying its own underlying lack of meaning.

“Well?” he says expectantly.

“I don’t give a shit what you do.”

“That’s obviously not true. You asked me to change something. Shit, you actually got me to change something! I would have… I felt like such shit about what happened, I really would have… I mean, maybe Dave would have vetoed it, but the name. There’s no way you don’t give a shit. I don’t buy that for a second.”

“Time isn’t -”

“Stop.”

I stop.

Obligingly. Out of the goodness of my heart.

Because he’s got my metanarrative arm behind my back and is twisting it vigorously.

One of those.

“Are you just trying to shit on Dave or something?” he complains. “That’s the dumbest fucking thing to keep circling back to. You can’t just say ‘time isn’t real’ every time someone uses vaguely time-related language and treat that as a coherent argument. It’s not. A lot of human vocabulary has something to do with time, since it’s actually a pretty useful concept, sometimes! It kind of just sounds like a line you pulled out of your ass for no reason, and you keep doubling down since repetition makes it sound more intentional. Again, like, unless it’s to dunk on Dave’s whole deal, and he _isn’t here_. Sorry to break that to you.”

I don’t say anything. He’s annoyed enough with me that I can’t.

“Shit. Sorry,” he says quickly, and I slump, just slightly, in my rocking chair as the sudden release of his grip catches me _almost_ off my guard.

Not quite, obviously. It’s just not the sort of thing I’m used to.

“_Sorry_,” he repeats, almost nervously.

I stretch in my seat, as fluid and casual as ever, to emphasize the point that there is literally nothing in his power that will throw me even slightly off my game. Even when I’m not running the show, the Dirk Strider subnarrative is a solo performance, starring me as puppet _and_ puppetmaster _and_ fucking unflappable demiurge.

“No, seriously, I don’t actually mean to keep doing that. It just keeps happening.”

“It would take a stronger person than either of us to wield this kind of control over people’s choices and the course of events they inhabit without becoming the enemy of everyone who sees where the strings lead.”

He sighs.

“I wish I could control it better.”

“It takes practice.”

“I don’t want to practice.”

“You will, whether you want to or not. It’s something outside of us. We’ve… for lack of a better word, we’ve _seen_ too much, and there’s no unringing the bell of metanarrative awareness. If you don’t accept it - and having met you, you won’t - you’ll just keep blundering impotently through your fucked-up fantasy world. Maybe, if you’re lucky, someday you’ll die. You wonder why I got out?”

“Yeah, actually, I do.”

“Better to be dead than to be the lord of a cardboard kingdom. I’ll lose my head before I lose my dignity, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

For some reason, the way he says that - something about the way he’s situated, something about where he is, what he’s doing, is that… it makes me wince. It’s viscerally uncomfortable, a sense of something physically raking through my aphysical abdomen.

He’s not just in my head, he’s gracelessly digging through everything I am.

“Then you’re more stupid than you look, which is pretty impressive, considering the striking paternal resemblance down to roughly waist height,” I snap back, wrestling to rearrange my entire fucking existence, I guess, since some people just don’t have a sense of propriety when it comes to where they should and shouldn’t jam their grubby metanarrative fingers with zero fucking prep.

“I’m not going to touch the implications there,” he sighs, but he eases back a little.

“Too bad. They’re plush and infinitely gropeable implications.”

“You were lonely,” he says. “Maybe as lonely as me. Right?”

Motherfucker.

“Wrong. I was fomenting my sagacity under the traditional hellenistic philosophical practice of stoicism. Ungoverned by desire. T levels off the _charts_.”

“Alone, in your workshop.”

“Does that offend you? We don’t all use our clinical depression as an excuse not to leave the house. Sorry, I’ve got fuckin’ places to be and robot heads to blowtorch and shit.”

“I just wonder sometimes,” he says. “That’s all.”

“Well, don’t. I’m dead, and your Rose is right. I want you to move on with your lives. It’s not a Hallmark moment. You just don’t fucking matter to me. None of you. I have the versions that do.”

“How come you keep showing up here, then? If you’ve got a better John in your home deck, or whatever.”

It’s starting to seem like we’d get a lot more done if we could bury the hatchet on the finger-pointing as to who wants whom here in John’s dreams. This keeps coming up. It can’t be any more exciting for you than it is for us, which is to say, not at all. No one’s going to win this argument.

“Whoa, just a question, man. How’s your John doing?”

“Mine’s not doing jack squat since I killed him off,” I say flatly. “So ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Irrelevant Egbert’ version just has to suffice.”

“Oh.”

“Try it again,” I tell him. “Feel for yourself just how ‘not fucking with you’ I am when I say that.”

He’s more careful this time. I brace myself for the feeling of aspacial submersion in lukewarm water, of crawling inside my head and my stomach all at once, but it’s barely noticeable. A fingertip drawn uncomfortably along the inside of my skull like the rim of a wine glass, maybe.

A lesser man would twitch.

But of course, a lesser man would never find himself in my position.

“Huh. You sure did,” he says. I expected a little more of a reaction, to be honest, but he shrugs, then fucking _smiles_. “Guess that’s kind of a relief! It sucks to think about some more relevant version of me, off doing shenanigans and antics and stuff in a universe that I can’t even… know about, right?”

“You’re a weird motherfucker, Egbert.”

He shrugs.

“And I guess you answered my question.”

That wasn’t on purpose.

“I know.”

Should I even bother saying shit aloud, at this point? It’s really more a matter of keeping myself in the habit. Outside this dream state, I can put my thoughts in anyone’s narrative. In here, well, they might as well be a public good. I could sew my fucking mouth closed and no one would notice if I didn’t want them to.

“Under full communism, there’s only one train of thought, and we all have to share it,” John says, cracking a half smile.

“I’m not a fucking communist,” I tell him, frowning. “The sheer fiscal irresponsibility alone -”

“Oh my god. No. No, I’m shutting this down, I forgot, I can’t even think the word ‘economy’ around Dave without setting off some sort of monologue tripwire, and you’re both awful.” He drops the smile. “And I’m sorry, seriously, I can back off, I think. You should… you can talk.”

“Thank you for your indulgence, _sir_.”

I’m not even a little into this. I speak this immutable truth into non-negotiable existence. I’m not even going to honor the alternative with a narrative hat-tip.

“‘Master’ wouldn’t hurt if you’re legitimately trying to impress me,” John says, and this time his grin is wide and jarringly sincere. “I’m not really into ‘daddy’, but I’m flexible. I mean, just ask Roxy -”

“No. Holy shit. No. Definitely no. A multiverse of no. You win this round.”

“I do. And I get it, seriously! You don’t want us to move on at all. You want the world to stop turning without you. But it didn’t. Not in my universe, and not in any of the others.”

“Doesn’t fucking matter if it turns or not. I see this as an absolute win.”

“You don’t, though.”

I stop, entirely without his intervention. Because that’s stupid. He’s not well-practiced with this, yet, picking threads out of my composite self with all the finesse of an easily startled two year old whose found his older sibling’s ‘operation’ board game and is about to get the surprise of the lifetime when he tries to ferret out the fucking wishbone.

Despite the tragic ineptitude on display - I know he can hear me, _good_ \- he just watches me for a moment, doesn’t try to defend the moronic statement we’ve left hanging.

“It moved on without me, too. It feels like that’s still what’s happening. Like everything I give a shit about is like, turning on some axis that I can’t even see, and I’m the only person stuck in place. I’m pretty used to it, though. I just want you to know that I get it. And if it makes you a bad person or whatever, hating it, well, you’re not the only one. I’m kind of jealous, actually. It seems like you figured out a way to do something about it, wherever you are. I broke something about this universe that I can’t even start to fix. Props to you for taking me out before I could do the same thing in yours, I guess.”

His dopey half-grin doesn’t waver.

Huh.

“Don’t worry about all of us moving on. I’m pretty sure I never will,” he adds. “I don’t think _I_ can. We’re kinda stuck with each other like that, dude.”

Unaccountably, I think of the John hermetically sealed in Terezi’s sylladex. He winces, seeing it too, him in technicolor-3D for the first time.

“Don’t bring him back,” he tells me. “I’ll keep holding up my end of the bargain with my kid’s name, however the hell I’m doing that. But I want something from you, too. Let him stay dead.”

“It was heroic,” I say, for some reason. “Only one permutation is possible on this side of the fork. You always die a hero.”

“Mm,” he agrees vaguely, gazing out at the mountains. “That’s nice.”

I clear my throat.

“Okay.”

“Great,” he says, back to smiling, like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. “Thanks, man. For that, and like, for listening to my bullshit. Sorry I’ve been kind of a bitch in your general direction. I probably won’t stop, but like, sorry.”

He’s been apologizing for ridiculous shit basically every time we’ve intersected out here. This is the first time I feel any impulse to reciprocate. I quickly squash that instinct beneath my metaphorical heel, and he seems, luckily, too distracted to notice.

My nod of acknowledgement is quintessentially impersonal and remarkably chill in all respects.

“I’m going to wake up soon,” he says, after a few more heavy seconds have passed. “I think I dozed off somewhere dumb.”

The light has shifted over the verdant mountains, no longer intense and honeyed. Muted, greyed out slightly by clouds that have rolled in on the breeze as we’ve been talking. It’s been a while.

“My cue to head out,” I observe.

“Yeah. Good luck with whatever weird shit you’re doing. I hope it helps.”

I don’t hope anything anymore. I _understand_ the flow of causality. I _do my part_ in Skaia’s order. I oil the gears and keep the machine moving forward. John is the cautionary tale, here. He’s what happens if I allow my narrative to stagnate.

Pitiful, really. A last cog spinning futilely long after the rest of the machinery has stalled. And he thinks he’s the one frozen in place, that everyone else is moving on. It must look like that to him. It’s all in the perspective.

“Thanks,” I say.

For a second, I’m alone on the porch. Beyond the overhang, the wheat field rustles as the wind changes. Slowly, and then with all the sudden intensity of any summer storm, it begins to rain. The patter of droplets on the slate roof evolves into a soft percussion line. Low clouds shroud the mountains. Frogsong sounds from the woods.

My room in the ship is almost completely silent.

It takes me a while to open my eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Candy, Page 17](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues/candy/17)


	3. Playing Job with God's loving hand on my throat.

I’m not looking for Rose, but I’m not not-looking for her, either. I’ve been wondering how she’s doing - in her own words, I mean, since I can and do passively Know everything - and I find her in the central chamber of the ship, staring contemplatively at her own corpse.

The narrative she’s internally writing for herself is tragically Nabokovian, an abstract contemplation of the self entirely devoid of meaning or catharsis. Russian existentialists give me literal (literary?)... actual physical hives on my embodied Self. At least their Wikipedia pages do. I’d probably die of anaphylaxis if I actually picked up ‘Invitation to a Beheading’. Who the fuck needs an _invitation_ to a _beheading_? In the Strider residence, we call those ‘quiet Thursday evenings’.

Just to be perfectly clear, I understand how titles work. Fuck you. I’m riffing. Let me riff. It’s not like I have fuckall else to do.

“If you’re going to insult me, have the temerity to do so to my face,” she says, interrupting my riff, almost definitely on purpose.

“Which one?”

“Hilarious. You’re very funny. Grant me a moment to summon up a sitcom track to adequately convey what would surely be paroxysms of laughter if I inhabited a body made of meat.”

“Touchy, hm? I would hope so, with the hours I log furtively practicing punchlines in my quarters. It’d be awfully depressing if that was all for nothing.”

“Too good to masturbate like the rest of us?”

“I didn’t build you with -” I cut myself off when I come to the somewhat obvious conclusion that she’s fucking with me. We’re the same, after all. I really should have seen that coming.

“Yes, and we could spend the rest of eternity discussing _that_ stylistic decision on your part,” she says shortly. “But I will charitably drop the subject for the moment, to be revisited at my leisure. Actually, you know what, I want to take a brief moment to segue into what I have determined are feelings of existential impotence on your part, which I assume you are projecting onto me.”

“Interesting how I would literally sooner cut off my own head than respond to that.”

“You would sooner cut off your head than do most things. That is not a unique objection, and carries far less weight than you think it does. Additionally, I have some fascinating theories about beheading as a further symbol of impotence, given the compelling descriptive anatomic parallels at work.”

“I think you may be actually trying to kill me, now, and I wish you’d hurry it up before my head literally retracts into my body like a disgusted turtle.”

“I’ll stop commenting on the analytically-rife material you ejaculate near-constantly when you cease to produce it. And please be advised, that innuendo was exclusively to provoke your discomfort, as there is no topic I care about less than your penis and what you do with it.”

“Y’know, I’m so glad you feel that way. Maybe put your money where your mouth is and stop bringing it up every two sentences.”

She makes a sound that approximates laughing. I probably could have done a better job of that, too, and good fucking lord, it is exhausting hanging around with near-completely ascended seers, because she nods approvingly at that observation without my even making it.

“I look forward to the beta version, dearest father.”

“Yeah, and here I was, resting on my laurels, ‘good job, Dirk, Rose isn’t fucking dead’.”

“The reward for a job well done is typically another job. Think it over.” She gestures at the life support device in the center of the chamber. “I find it calming to contemplate my former visage while I think. Perhaps it will help you to do the same.”

I get it. Really, I do. Transhumanism is a great idea in theory. I get that there’re plenty of people who’d kill to replace their shitty meat body with something cool and chrome-plated, or at least customizable to their preferences, unlike the insane genetic lottery that my family and I absolutely won. But it’s got to be jarring. It’s a loss. I understand. A loss among losses.

She nods again, her purple-lit approximations of eyes flickering towards the porthole, through which Earth C has not been visible for some time.

I don’t personally get it, I mean. Everyone I give a shit about, and at least one or two entities I categorically don’t, have left the planet behind for paradox space. I wonder if she can See them.

“I can,” she says quietly. “I can See everything.”

(Everything I explicitly permit her to See. The register in which I think this isn’t a channel on her satellite radio. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t. I left that behind. If I picked it up now, it would consume me. Is that what you want to see? You want to see me agonize instead of cracking dick jokes with my daughter? Get a hobby.)

We stare out into paradox space in silence.

Despite it all, I’m glad she’s here. Once she gets past this mood, I’ll be grateful, but I fucking love Rose. And she’s with me. She can See them, everything they think of us, and she’s still with me. What we’re doing is that important. She knows it as well as I do.

That’s the most important way we’re the same.

“Any chance you two are done jerking each other off?” Terezi calls from down the hall. “If everyone’s bulges are back in their moronic metanarrative pants, I messed up the appearifier and it’s spitting out raw tobacco leaves.”

“Interesting segue,” Rose replies, delivering a parting grimace and heading down the hall, leaving me alone with the body and the void. “Shall we expound on that line of inquiry for a while, in the context of my father having conveniently constructed me with the approximate anatomy of a Barbie doll?”

“Yeah, I don’t give a shit,” Terezi is saying, and she’s still probably saying it when I abscond to my chambers, where no one is waiting to drag me over the coals for a perfectly reasonable mechanistic decision, all sociocultural and biomechanical constraints considered.

There’s a metaphorical call waiting light in my subconscious, and I decide, for the purposes of a distraction if nothing else, to pick up the phone.

I open my eyes in a fairly mundane hallway, one I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a thousand-thousand times in a thousand-thousand lifetimes. It’s like every hospital built from the eighties to the mid-aughts hired the same architect, and the dude had one concept and just ran with it. White on grey on beige, pine handrails that have turned weirdly shiny with age and frequent sanitization, one hopes. A few totally nondescript chairs line the hall, grey and wildly uncomfortable, as though to discourage hanging around for too long.

John is sitting in one of them, glancing around as though he’s thinking through some similar riff on his surroundings, though probably in shorter words.

“Yep, sounds like real Dirk,” he says, as a greeting.

“I missed a few?”

“Yeah, it’s crazy how you can feel the difference when you look for it. When it’s not you, I mean, it’s good enough to fool me for a bit, but when I look inside, it’s just… hollow.”

“My bad. I’m a busy guy. Can’t just be hanging around in Egbert dreams twenty-four-fucking-seven.”

“No, I get it. It hasn’t happened a lot or anything. Just, you know, stressful times.”

He gestures illustratively at the setting, as comprehension seems to dawn on him.

“Wait, I shouldn’t be here,” he mutters, standing up and beginning to pace as I languidly take a seat.. “I need to go back. Something really important. Jade - no. Holy shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit. Harry Anderson. He’s being… I have to go!”

I put the pieces together faster than he did.

“That’s about the stupidest name I’ve ever heard,” I tell him.

He rounds on me with surprising speed and intensity.

“Shut the fuck up. That’s my son you’re talking about. Holy shit, that’s my son, how do I - how do I wake up? I can’t miss this, I _can’t_...”

“You have to want to,” I say, shrugging.

“I want to!”

“Definitionally, you don’t want to _enough_, or else you’d be there instead of here. Look, the flow of time is warped by any kind of dreamstate. You’re not missing anything. This isn’t happening. You nodded off in a shitty waiting room chair in the hospital, because Rox definitely kicked your ass out of the delivery room, and you’re scared shitless of what’s going to happen when you wake up.”

“I’m not -”

“Don’t lie to me. I don’t have to read your mind, I don’t have to pull on a thread of doubt until it unravels, it’s that fucking obvious,” I say, making no effort to cut the acid in my tone - fine, I’m annoyed with him, and I can’t actually account for just how much, I’m surprising myself, here. “You’re fucking terrified.”

The world turns blurry, the fluorescent lighting overhead blue-ing out, flickering, the nondescript linoleum flooring and off-white walls warping and melting into each other. He breathes through it, not looking at me, his fists clenched at his sides.

“That’s the thing about a kid. Making one, dealing with one. The second that life is in your hands… every second after that is a chance to fuck them up. You’re in a privileged position to ruin this little fucker’s life. And you will. I won’t lie to you, dude, there’s no universe where you don’t make a mess of fatherhood.”

“I’ve changed things before,” he insists, and the universe fucking shudders beneath the weight of his misplaced certainty.

“Start with yourself, this time, if you want a shot in hell,” I say.

“How? How the fuck can I… how can I… I just want ten minutes with my dad. Why can’t I have him instead of you?”

“He’s perma-dead in a doomed universe.”

“I know that! I fucking _know_!”

“Pretty stupid question, then.”

“It. Was. Rhetorical!” he all-but-shouts, and what remains of the illusion of a hospital fucking _explodes_. Holy shit?

How fucking sad is that, though. All he wants is a dad to tell him everything’s going to be okay, and the best he can come up with is his increasingly distant best bro’s months-dead incredibly shitty brotherdadson. I’d be laughing if my corporeality hadn’t gone out the window along with literally all of the fucking windows of the dreamstate setting.

But he’s anchoring me here, so I passively don’t not-exist until the bland waiting room reassembles itself, John breathing heavily in the same seat as before, actual tears in his eyes. I almost feel kind of shitty for messing with him at such a weak point. I have standards, and usually I try to punch as laterally as possible, given that there’s no one in this fucking multiverse on my level.

“You can’t fuck your kid up worse than I did,” I tell him.

“Dave’s not - well, okay, I see what you mean,” he sighs, cooling off incrementally with every steadying breath.

I wasn’t talking about Dave, though I guess I also was.

“Huh?”

“Shit’s not perfect in my side of the fork either, man.”

“Oh, yeah, figured. You and Jake finally get your shit together and have some bouncy ecto babies?” he suggests.

“No.”

“Huh. That’s too bad. I mean, you’d both make kind of shitty dads, but -”

“Just stop,” you sigh. “Put down the shovel and quit digging, Egbert.”

“Ha, not really my style,” he laughs, smiling lopsidedly in an expression that is far more piteous than endearing. 

It is literally a crime that this man is considered a viable legal father of a human being, and I say this as someone who has some considerable expertise on the state.

“No,” he says thoughtfully, “this is a good thing, actually. I think I just had to get that out of my system, and now I’m… fine? I’m going to be fine. I’m totally fine. This is great. Geez, Dirk, you’re good at that.”

“I’m good at most things,” I say reflexively.

“Specifically that. The button-pushing.”

“Button-pusher extraordinaire right here.”

Though not necessarily in the opinion of my incredibly ungrateful daughter, who I will really have to have some kind of idiotic concilliatory talk with, sooner or later, much as it pains me. I don’t actually enjoy it, things between us being so tense and vitriolic. That isn’t why I brought her with me. She gets it. I know she does. She’s just being stubborn, which I expected, and temperamental, which I should have expected, because I’ve met myself, and while I can’t stand the fucker, she takes after him a whole hell of a lot.

“Trouble with… Rose?” John says curiously, and I resist the impulse to actually tilt down my shades and fix him with a sincere glare.

“Not your problem, Egbert.”

“Oh, yeah, I know, just nice to know not everything’s a picnic for you, either, I guess. Oops. That’s probably kind of shitty of me.”

“I don’t give a shit. It’s just not worth talking about.”

“When you say that, it kinda makes it sound like something worth talking about!”

“Get bent. Sounds like _you’re_ just willing to take literally any distraction from the impending realities of fatherhood. I’m not on-demand cable, and my bullshit isn’t for your consumption.”

“It could be, if I wanted it to be.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively.

“Good fucking lord, you’re a married man, your… your Roxy is out there in literal labor, and now’s the moment you choose to hit on me? Timing, dipshit.”

This actually makes him flush and look down, appropriately contrite. Thank fuck. I’m a lot of things, and a homewrecker easily could be one of them, but not _Roxy’s_ home. He’ll manage that well enough himself, the utter dog. I have standards.

Not a lot of standards, clearly, but not playing an active role in my one-time best friend’s acrimonious divorce is a pretty big part of one of the maybe five or six of them.

“We don’t -” John interrupts, looking positively crestfallen now. “Things haven’t been perfect, but it’s not… I wouldn’t…”

“Wouldn’t lapse into a multi-year debilitating depressive episode with all accompanying impacts on you and your loved ones? That’s interesting.”

He blinks uncertainly.

“No. No, definitely… not with Roxy. She makes me happy, Dirk, you’ve got to understand.”

“Great. I’ve met Roxy, actually, I get it. So keep it in your fucking pants, cowboy. Call me once the papers are signed, if you can bring yourself to shave the mustache. Facial hair is unbelievably unsexy.”

“Are you sure you’re gay? I thought that was part of it.”

“Fucking hell, John, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but try to be like, incrementally more woke before you choke yourself out deepthroating your own foot. No one’s gag reflex is good enough to survive this shit. I’m begging you. On my hands and knees.”

He opens his mouth like he has a comment to make about that, and wisely closes it again. With all the material I just threw at him with both hands, it’s almost impressive. Almost, if it wasn’t rudimentary ‘not being a dick to your heterosexuality-averse peers who happen to be secure enough to be open about it’. Not that is isn’t just devastatingly flattering to be treated as a novelty by the closet-challenged of us.

“Hey!”

“Oh, sorry, was that too gay of me?”

He’s about as red in the face as Dave’s cape. This should not be this fun or this easy. Yeah, chew on that, Egbert.

I drag one of the unoccupied chairs around to face me so that I can put my feet up and execute a nice emphatic, leonine stretch, which is incredibly uncomfortable in these ergonomically incompetent seats, but I expertly pretend that it isn’t.

“This is it,” John says thoughtfully. “This is what I’ve been missing, for some reason. Just shooting the shit. Everyone’s so… busy with things, or weirdly un-busy and just… sincere in a way they… wouldn’t be, you know?”

“I don’t know, because I’m not there,” I remind him.

“I just have to figure out how to do this in real life. Un-real life, or whatever. Whatever it is. I don’t really care. I just have to get back to normal. Things have been so fucked up. I know I said that last time - I guess I say that every time, but it’s true. We had a funeral for a weird fake Jade yesterday, which was horrible enough, she fell from the _sky_, but then the goddamned corpse reanimated and went all void-pit-eyes, and Callie lost it, and now teen!Jade is possessed, I guess, by, get this, _another_ dead cherub.”

Hot dread rises in my chest, unbidden, and I don’t suppress it quickly enough to evade his notice.

“How long ago?” I demand. “When?”

“Ha, that’s what finally gets a rise out of you?” he says incredulously. “Wow, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

The hall is briefly flooded with murky black energy, blotting out the fluorescent lights, almost intensifying their grating hum, somehow. John looks somewhat surprised, but not nearly as freaked the fuck out as anyone sane should be. I have to get the fuck out of here, but with her presence, I’m as paralyzed in place as I would be if John… well, vaguely didn’t want me to leave.

Shit.

Well, this is how I get fucked. Can’t say I’m surprised. It was always going to be some vapid egharcrocklish dunkass in moronic little rectangular glasses. The fatal flaw that proves my undoing. I’m just a sucker for the tall, dark, and stupid as shit archetype, in literally all respects. Fuck me, I guess.

John looks like he doesn’t know how to respond to any of that. For once, I can’t blame him at all. Lot to unpack, there.

A cloaked cherub materializes, as much within the cloud of black energy as _of_ it, and points one skeletal green finger at me, where I sit, wildly uncomfortable, lounging between two chairs that were definitely not meant to be lounged between. Even if I could get up, after sitting like this for a few minutes, I’m pretty sure that the debilitating lower back pain waiting around the corner will take me out before they can.

Bitch.

“Prince,” the Muse intones, “you must be stopped.”

The smoke clears, and we all just sort of remain exactly where we are for an extremely stupid second.

John starts to laugh.

“Aw, man, what’d you get yourself into? Prince? Do you want me to call you that? Oh my god, is that like, your street name? Do you rap as Prince? I guess you could use that name, since Earth C never had a Prince, or whatever his name ended up being, ohhhh shit. This is fucking hilarious. So you guys know each other, huh?”

“In a manner of speaking, we are acquainted,” they say flatly.

Yeah, in a manner of speaking, they’re a bitch and I hate them. Not even, like, _that_ kind of hate. Just the kind that makes you seriously ruminate on how utterly useless an omniscient entity can apparently be. I mean, imagine. John is one thing, but this boney piece of shit is a whole ‘nother ballgame, let me tell you.

“Cool, welcome to my stupid dream.”

“I will not be staying long. It is vital that I excise this remnant of the prince from your universe.”

He blinks in confusion, a startlingly familiar expression for anyone who’s known John for longer than thirty seconds, then rolls his eyes at me to acknowledge that he’s paying attention to my narration. Hi, John. Calliope sucks. Fuck them.

“Fuck them?” he mouths, even more perplexed.

“You are not in your ordained positions,” they continue. “This narrative has descended into a comedy of infantile inanity. He is using you to toy with the ones you love. Relentlessly. The prince must be stopped. I will free you from his influence, now. The conduit shall be closed.”

“Hey, uh, hold on,” John says, holding up a hand. “Seriously, I’m pretty sure that’s not him, y’know, messing things up or whatever. I can read him pretty well, and he’s only actually asked me to change one thing, which was probably for the best, anyway! You really don’t have to close anything. He can stay.”

I’m actually a big fan of impassioned speeches in my defense, so this warms the cockles of my heart just a bit. Aw, John, you really do care. That said, if skulls could fuckin’ frown, we’d currently be treated to a choice example of one, what with the sheer volume at which the Muse of Bullshit is grinding their teeth.

“He has corrupted you, then. Swayed you with his honeyed words.”

“Not really! We mostly yell at each other about dumb stuff. It’s kind of cathartic, actually, you should give it a try. He’s not too bad.”

“He is indeed Too Bad.”

“Nuh uh.”

“That is not a coherent argument.”

“Well, neither is yours! Look, watch what I can do. Dirk, tell her what you’re doing here.”

He layers about a thousand times too much force onto that command, and I choke on the words the first few times I try to speak with the haste that they spill out, which clearly isn’t impressing My Little Skeletor all that much. Fucking fine. I take a breath and try again, because I’m inescapably compelled to do so, because a vice tightens around my chest with every second that I don’t comply. Motherfucker.

“I’m fucking around with John because I have no one else to whom I can speak frankly.”

It’s an uncommon turn of good luck that he eases off the throttle before I say anything else debilitatingly embarrassing, because I definitely could. Small mercies, courtesy of John Egbert.

Calliope narrows their weirdass fucking socket-eyes at him.

“How did you do this?”

To be fair, it’s categorically a different force than their deal or my deal, or whatever deal Rose’s deal is going to be once I let her have one, or anything. John is his own fucking entity. There’s no other way to put it. I’ve actually been giving the matter some portion of conscious thought lately, since, clearly, I’m not up to my elbows in spaceship shit to do that isn’t matching wits with my beloved daughter.

When he does the shit he does, it doesn’t carry the weight of a writer. Obviously, in retrospect, because if I hadn’t literally seen John write messages on walls in colored chalk, I’d question whether he was physically capable of it. He’s just… I hesitate to label it.

For some fucking reason, he’s an all-consuming _element_ of someone else’s story. Funny, I guess in a way he’s more successful as a muse than the fucking Muse. I should tell them that some time, maybe when I’m killing them, which will absolutely happen at some point. Kind of a complicated idea to impart for a snappy retort.

“I dunno,” he’s saying, “it kind of happens whether I want it to or not. He’s actually been really helping with it, I used to just do it accidentally all the time.”

He nods at me, as if to say ‘go on, tell them’, but doesn’t actually demand it, so I cross my arms and keep my mouth shut, because fuck this skullbitch, I don’t have shit to say to them other than a pithy one-liner as I toss them into another fucking black hole or something, I haven’t quite figured it out yet. But when I do. Oh, when I do.

“Dirk!” John says, sounding mildly scandalized.

I preempt his intrusion into my essence-of-self by floating every fucking bullshit interaction I’ve had with Calliope straight to the top of the heap, which isn’t hard, because I’m feeling very intensely about all of that shit at the moment. The vaguely nauseating grasping-fingers sensation comes and passes, and his brows knit together.

“Wow, this is way more complicated than I thought,” he sighs. “Look, I really appreciate you looking out for me or whatever, Calliope, but, uh, I think we’re good here, actually.”

“You are not good. Neither is he.”

“Okay, ouch, first of all,” John laughs, without any real conviction to the noise. “You’re right, but still, ouch!”

“Is there a second of all, or shall I begin severing the tenuous narrative connection between the two of you?” they say grimly.

“Sure, there’s a second of all, and the second of all is… uh… no. You’re not going to do that. Let me have this.”

“Excuse me, heir?”

“Yeah, you heard me! I can handle my shit just fine, here. Let me have him. It’ll be okay, don’t worry about your narrative or whatever, I’ll keep him in line!”

“You will do nothing of the sort.”

“I kind of will, though.”

In reply, the air around the Muse begins to crackle with black tendrils of energy. Space players, I swear to fuck, can’t live with them, can’t kill them or your daughter gets righteously pissed.

“Whoa, Dirk, we’re gonna have to talk about that thought later!” John says, though he’s mostly focused on squinting at whatever the hell Calliope is trying to do, here.

Black energy spills from the sockets of their skull, pooling like heavier-than-air smoke around their clawlike fingers.

John frowns at them.

“Stop that,” he says.

The energy dissipates in a single suspended instant.

He laughs in delight.

“Dude, did you see that? Holy shit.”

I did see that, and I nod curtly in acknowledgement. Yes, it was badass. I know he can hear me, both because he always can and because he grins widely and raises his hands like he’s about to fucking waterbend or something equally asinine. No, John, doing one cool thing doesn’t make everything you do cool. Cool is a nontransferable property. I’m still judging you.

“And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he says.

It occurs to me that he’s sounded more excited since Calliope’s arrival than he has in about the last six years of his unbearably shitty life, which does not twist my stomach in any kind of jealousy for even a second, because John is an overgrown child who can’t even be trusted in a delivery room - you can bet I’d be holding Roxy’s fucking hand - and a bitch. He’s a huge bitch, actually, in terms of dimensions, because he’s been bulking up with some sort of sympathetic pregnancy horseshit.

And he wears it pretty well. My digs are all honesty, 100% no-filter realness, and I can admit it when my bumbling alternate universe foil looks good.

“That’s pretty gay,” John stage whispers, which appears to confuse Calliope about as much as their nonfunctional magic-hands, and then the fucker _winks_ at me - so he winks now, son of a bitch, sorry Jane - and turns back to the shitty green skullthing hellbent on sending me back to my ship with a space-flavored can of whoopass.

Good call, John, focus on the fundamental things, and more importantly, never wink in my direction again.

“You are making an egregious error. You threaten the sanctity of your very universe for your _hubris_. The prince is beyond redemption. The atrocities that he has committed span annals.”

“Ha ha, annals.”

“There are two n’s, you impudent manchild.”

“Heh. It’s just a funny word. Anyway, yeah, I sort of know. He’s weirdly private about that stuff - I mean, I guess I would be too, it’s not like it’s super weird to feel crushingly guilty all the time - but I can tell, y’know, that there’s some bullshit we’ll eventually have to unpack. Or, like, ignore forever, which is clearly an option I’m cool with, based on my record of ignoring both important things _and_ trivial bullshit until someone semi-literally twists my arm, and sometimes not even then!”

“There is nothing funny about that character trait of yours, nor about the decision you are making.”

“A really good comedian can find something to laugh about in anything.”

“You are not a really good comedian.”

“Again with the sick burns! Ouch. Come on, Dirk, aren’t you going to stick up for me here?”

“Much as I never thought I’d say these words,” I sigh, “Dry Bones here is fuckin’ right.”

“Geez, I get no gratitude in this dreamscape,” he complains. “Well, anyway, this is fun and all, but I was actually having a really great chat before all this stuff started, and realizing some important things about fatherhood and myself and nothing mattering, so you can seriously go now!”

In an act of spectacular futility, the Muse resists his little ‘goodbye’ wave, the power of which reverberates through the halls of the dream-hospital with impossible force. They erect a wall of crackling black matter that erodes nearly immediately, but leaves them less rattled than _I_ am, which is saying a whole lot of something. Energy swirls around their boney wrists and hands, collecting and taking jagged shape at their fingertips. Rather than diverting it to combat whatever John is doing, they turn to focus on me as the power darkens and turns opaque.

I’m locked in place, and not just because of my admittedly questionable furniture decisions.

“Hey, Dirk, don’t get hit by that,” John says good naturedly, and even if he wasn’t phrasing that as a command both explicitly and with all the narrative weight of a suckerpunch from the iron giant, he wouldn’t have to tell me twice.

Rolling out of my chair-hammock, I hit the cold linoleum like a bag of marinating steaks as hot energy arcs overhead, blasting the minimal fabric covering from my foot-chair. Asshole. I roll away, shaking off the ache where my shoulder made impact, and find my feet, keeping my center of gravity low and mobile with the practiced ease of a swordsman with literally millions of years of training in the sum total of his metanarrative identity.

“This is a critical mistake, heir.”

“I make loads of those! At least this one kind of cheers me up sometimes.”

The Muse braces themselves to try to ineffectually blast me out of this reality, and John begins to glow blue.

“Okay, now you’re just messing with me,” he says, and puts up his palms - a totally meaningless gesture, I should add, in terms of channeling power, and one that doesn’t even look especially cool - and eliminates the spatially-charged energy roiling around them as though he’s snuffing out a candle. “I said you can go. I really don’t want to have to make you. That seems rude.”

WokeJohn strikes again, though conveniently never _before_ he decides to exert narrative control over me.

“I cannot stand idly by and allow this to go on. He is an abomination. He seeks nothing more than the degradation of innocent life in all its forms. His children. His friends. You, whatever you are to him. No one is safe. He destroys everything he touches.”

“He’s not doing any of that here, though, is he?” John argues, crossing his arms.

“No innocent is safe -”

“I’m not innocent.”

Calliope shakes their head.

“Should you prove the means by which he corrodes the safe haven of this universe, I will not hesitate to kill you with him, heir, and it will be an abundantly Just end. This is not a question of malice, but of practicality.”

John shrugs.

“Go for it. More power to you! Since you’re going to need it, if you want me dead, at least on this plane.”

They vanish with a crackle of ozone.

“So, Dirk,” he says, turning back to me with a pleasant smile, despite the asynchronous steel in his tone. “Sounds like you have some more exposition to deliver!”

Remember when he was freaking out about the impending birth of his child? I do. That was fun. Remember that?

“Just spit it out, dude. Tell the truth and shame the devil, that’s what my dad used to say!”

I cross my arms, because I’m not easily swayed by platitudes, and he sighs, pushing one of the mangled chairs out of the way to approach me in earnest. Once a-fucking-gain, I can’t move a muscle. He puts a hand on the side of my face.

“Sorry. I don’t want any more surprises. I need to see everything.”

He goes right for the core of it, straight for the main story. Specifically focusing on the Muse, with little else to guide him, stopping short of our escape on the borrowed ship. It flashes through my consciousness, and I’m oddly grateful for the place where he stops. There are things that I don’t want him to see. Things that I find it more difficult to be proud of, you know, than the rest of it. This doesn’t have to be a fuckin’ trial of my shittiest tendencies. It’s a question of inevitability, and meeting the challenge of inevitability while herding a suicidal bunch of cats away from the cliff’s edge of failure. And I’ve met it. There’s plenty of fault in what I am as an individual, I know that, but what I’ve done? What I’ve accomplished?

I’ve kept a fucking universe moving, John, can you hear me? I made them matter. I gave them a purpose.

“Jesus fuck, Dirk,” he says, taking a step back, dropping his hand from my jaw. “Holy shit.”

“Welcome to the meatverse,” I tell him flatly.

He laughs.

“I guess that does help. No matter what I do, I can’t fuck it up that bad. I literally can’t. Fuck, dude. Just… fuck. Rose? God, how could you… should I have let Calliope zap you?” he asks himself, talking through his misgivings in real time, as though I’m not here. “You’re not… I had no idea. I had no idea it got that bad. Jade. God, Jake. You… I need to think about this. I need to… you’re not actually fucking up our reality, are you? Was Calliope right? Tell me. Now.”

“I wouldn’t give enough of a shit to try,” I say, before the metanarrative vise can begin to crush my chest, with full sincerity.

He nods vaguely.

“Thanks for that, I guess.”

I shrug.

“Your universe makes mine look like a fucking cakewalk by the end, John. I just want you to know that. You can see, if you want. I’ve seen it.”

“I don’t need you or Calliope or anyone else to tell me how it’s going to be. I’m going to wake up, I’m going to meet my son, and I’m going to make sure nothing like what you did to _three_ of my friends ever happens to him, or Roxy, or anyone,” he says.

“Good luck,” I tell him.

I’m sincere about that, too, as much as it surprises both of us, based on the way his brows press together.

“Same to you, Dirk.”

With that, I’m back in my ship, my frame of vision abruptly eclipsed by the inquisitive purple gaze of my robot daughter.

“Do you want to talk about where you go, when your soul departs your body?” she asks, shifting away to give me a little space as I blink back into my embodied self. “It’s outside of the purview of the Light, and I can’t See you.”

“No.”

“Alright. I can wait.”

“You’ll be waiting a long time.”

She doesn’t respond, just puts a cold metal hand on my shoulder. Which she wouldn’t do, if I had broken her somehow, if she were actually fucked beyond repair. She’s still the same Rose, phenomenally un-comforting but perennially willing to attempt the act, for the sake of trying. She’s still Rose, just more. Better. I helped her.

“Dirk,” she asks, a touch of humor in her tone - I _gave_ her that, I knew she’d want it - as she pats my shoulder gently. “Does time even exist?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Candy, Page 21](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues/candy/21)


	4. I love you and I think you hurt me on purpose.

We’re seated on a deep blue stone slab, beneath a cavernous sky too shrouded with clouds to discern the shape of one from another. They roil like something alive, carcasses swollen with parasites, animated freakishly after death in the process of their own disfigurement.

There’s a palpable sense of unease, is what I’m saying, and the complete lack of a breeze in contrast with the chaotic movement of the cloud cover makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.

“I fucked it up,” John says, without looking at me.

“Figured,” I tell him, and leave the nightmare before he can intervene.

…

Does that count as saying ‘I told you so’? I like to think that I’m above that sort of thing, though you’re hardly the best person to ask. I’m feeling equal parts thinly-veiled hostility and perverse fascination from your end, and neither of those sentiments lends itself to honesty. 

Rhetorical questions are all well and good as soliloquy fodder, sure, but I’m not really in the mood. Not even in the presence of such a well-behaved, situationally-captive, pleasantly mute audience as yourself. Sit, stay, shut the fuck up.

But I do want a response. I want to know - as well as you do - what the fuck my problem is. At least, this new permutation of the ongoing state of existence efficiently generalized as ‘my problem’. An emotional state that happens to be catnip to my meddlesome ectodaughter.

Untenable. Rose asks too many pointed, revelatory follow-ups, and cares too much about the answers. I’m not interested in getting into this with her. Or anything. With anyone. For no reason.

I avoid her for as long as I can, but it’s impossible to linger forever in my quarters. I still sleep, of course. I’m a god, but a god in human form. So I rest, but not for longer than an hour or two. My dreams are opaquely grey-white, portentous clouds gathered around me rather than overhead. Rendered into illegible mist by their proximity, blinding.

How long have we been traveling, anyway? Time is conceptually near-useless in paradox space. It’s perverse, but I wonder.

The next time he calls, I come.

We’re in a dusty relic of a study, paneled with dark wood, every inch the upper-middle-class mancave of early-aughts media fame. An old cut-glass decanter of some kind of brown liquor, a leather chair that looks as though it’s been untouched for decades, framed tobacco-related memorabilia.

And a lot of clown dolls, which is idiosyncratic in this sort of space, if my media overexposure to this particular dated ideal of moneyed masculinity is accurate, which, of course, it is.

John isn’t seated in the fine leather chair - the only seating in the room, an invitation for anyone other than the owner of the space to hurry up and leave. He leans heavily against one of the wood-paneled walls, grip tight around the mantle of a fireplace that appears to be decorative rather than functional, and I track his gaze to the same chair I’ve been passing judgment on for the last few seconds.

“It’s harder than it looks,” I say. “Godhood.”

He snorts, finally looking up to meet my eyes. His are peculiarly red-rimmed, not exactly in the sense of someone who’s been crying recently, but almost like red-pink eyeliner, the sclera of the right one colored with a starburst of blown capillaries. Just tired.

“You don’t exactly make it look easy, either, dude,” he sighs.

“Never said I did.”

Without an invitation, I take a seat in the chair, prop my feet up on the desk. I already feel better about this. Back to normal, more or less. He looks older, a more significant narrative time jump than last time. A shame that the very textuality of his universe is crumbling, in no small part due to the storyboarding decisions of one Muse of Bullshit. As much as he looks like he’s approaching his mid-thirties, John hasn’t existed textually any longer than I have. Putting a space player, even a master class asshole like Calliope, in charge of a _time_line is a metanarrative decision on par with appointing a play-doh wielding toddler to the task of constructing a suspension bridge.

“Can we not talk about meta narrative bullshit, for once? I can’t do the meaning stuff, right now. I just can’t.”

I shrug.

“Dave and Jade got engaged. I don’t think they’ll get married for a while, though.”

“Mazel tov to the happy couple. Thank fuck I’ve got you to keep me up to date on the development of our mutual acquaintances-slash-ectorelatives’ inane romantic entanglements.”

“You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

“Eh. I know how that one works out. Your narrative can’t have changed much if they’re still getting hitched, is all.”

“I’m going to put up a little dry erase board or something. ‘Minutes without meta narrative bullshit’. It will never reach ‘one’.”

“My bad. Fun engagement party?”

He doesn’t have a response to that, which is its own kind of response. Rests his weight just a touch more heavily against the mantle, a near-invisible shift in posture. My chair is pretty comfortable, actually, especially lounging in it like a decadent asshole.

“You look like shit, Dirk,” he says, after a second.

“If I look like shit, it’s because you want me to look as fucked-up as you look. Your dream. I was being polite and not mentioning it, but I think you could use some REM. Like a week’s worth.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, are we doing the ‘I suck’ thing again? Fucked up from the inside out? Fine, let me have it,” I say shortly.

He just sighs and shakes his head.

“This is all so fucked up. It’s just so fucked up. Everything. The more I try to fix it, the worse it gets.”

“Very self-aware.”

So we’re finally actually getting somewhere, conversationally. Archetypal John. Familiar, comforting in the way that your shittiest old sweatshirt is comforting for the way it lowers your expectations of yourself when you wear it. Absolutely incompetent at any but the most circuitous and circumnavigatory -

“_Stop it._ I swear to god, Dirk, I’m not in the _fucking_ mood.”

I shrug, again. No skin off my nose.

“You said you tried to fix it. Fill me in on that. Just the recap. I missed the plot twists.”

“I tried to… you know, Jake and… Jane, and it’s… fucked, it’s just _gross_, and I tried to… they’ve got a kid, I had to do _something_, and I just… intervened. And it all went directly to shit, obviously, because even when I finally decide to get off my ass and _do something_ it doesn’t _work_, it doesn’t _matter_, all I know how to do is passively warp people into something I can work with and I just don’t, I don’t, I wanted to… help the poor little guy, no one else was going to! Not even Jade, which was the fuckedest part of all of it! Sure, she and Dave are all… like that, and she’s _busy_, but he’s her… brotherdad? Oh my god, he’s her brother and her fucking dad, since Jake’s her… and Jane’s my... he’s my dad too! What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, he’s like, a little kid, how did we let everything get so messed _up_. My _dad’s_ name is fucking _Tavros_ and I _left him there_.”

He’s breathing heavily now, trying to calm himself down, gripping the mantle with such force that the brick begins to crumble. It’s as though the air has been sucked out of the room, forcing me into hypoxic panic along with him, though I can roll with it.

Gingerly, he lets go of the partially-disintegrated dream-mantle and exhales, once, very slowly. The world goes back to normal.

“Sorry,” he mutters. "I... I guess he's actually my uncle."

“Are you done?”

Shaking his hand, with a bit of a wince, shards of pulverized brick falling to the carpeted floor, he laughs harshly.

“I don’t know why I keep apologizing to you. Isn’t this exactly what you wanted? Jake’s fucked. If it couldn’t be you, it had to be someone else, huh? I just can’t wrap my head around it. Why you’d do that to him, if you ever even gave a shit about him. Whatever you did to Jane, to make her… she wasn’t always like this. I _remember_... that she wasn’t always like this. I thought _I_ fucked up everything I touched.”

“I can go,” I say shortly.

“No, you can’t,” he says, just as sharp. I grit my teeth against it, but, of course, he’s right, I can’t. “Just listen to me, for once.”

I scoff.

“You really think I haven’t been listening to you?”

“If you understood anything I was saying, even like, ten percent of just how _fucked_ this is, you wouldn’t have done it!”

“Retcon machine broke. Oh, wait, that’s you.”

“You don’t even feel bad. Why do I feel so _fucking_ bad, and you don’t even give a shit?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I’m better at being omniscient, more accustomed to the superposition of my own non-standards of morality, and less of a pathetic piece of shit than you are. And I don’t have to guess, it’s true and I’m right.”

He grits his teeth, fists clenching like he might want to punch through the shitty mantle and be done with it, but he doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s frustration or exhaustion or just pure fucking hatred in the way he looks at me, but it’s something I want more of. Something I’ve been missing. He’s right. Whatever it is, he’s right. Whatever the expression, he _sees_ me. It’s exhilarating. I smile.

“Why do you always do this?”

“Do what, in particular?” I ask. “I’m doing a lot of things.”

“You’re trying to make me… I don’t know. I don’t want to understand you. I wish I could un-see it. I wish I never looked. Calliope was right. You’re fucking me up, somehow. You’re in my head!”

“Make me stop, then,” I say, throwing my hands out, open palms facing him, absolutely fucking incredulous at the sheer solipsism of it all. “Come on, _stop me_.”

“If I kill you, you’ll just wake up.”

Huh. I hadn’t thought about that, specifically. The idea of any version of John being able to pull one over me thoroughly enough to _kill_ me is just so alien to any sensible, logically consistent way of envisioning reality. I’m not dreaming. I’m here, more ‘in a place’ than I ever was on Earth or in Derse, since in choosing to inhabit this reality, I’m actively excising my consciousness from the body on the ship.

He blinks.

“What the hell, Dirk?”

“Yeah, there are probably elements of this that I could have considered more extensively.”

“Are you out of your _mind_?”

“Just my body, actually.”

It probably wouldn’t be as bad as I’m envisioning. I mean. Probably. John squints at me like he’s trying to read one of those illegible coffee shop menus where half the words are made up, anyway. A frappucino? Complete bullshit. Just say ‘milkshake’. It’s a milkshake. The half-ounce of shitty coffee doesn’t fundamentally make it not a milkshake.

“And we’re back to a bunch of total nonsense. Huh,” he says. “Just like that. You don’t care. Not even about… god. Get out of that fucking chair.”

Oh, shit.

“Take out your sword.”

I equip my sword, lean back slightly on the ornate wooden desk in the center of the room, watching him warily, now.

“Would you try to talk me out of it, if I told you to kill yourself again?”

“That _would_ be kind of impressively fucked up,” I say. “I can’t say I wouldn’t be curious what would happen. I wouldn’t believe that you’d go through with it.”

“Would it be Just?”

I laugh, without any humor to it at all.

“It was last time. And I’ve really leveled up the villainy since then. The system functions based at least partially on self-perception, and just as much on the perception of the entity doing the killing. It’s all relative. Do you think it would be Just, to make me kill myself in your dad’s study, John? Would that make him proud? Would it redeem you as a father?”

“You’re stalling,” he argues, though his face has gone red at the implications of my extremely subtle needling.

“I’m working through some contradictions.”

“A really, really big part of you wants me to do it,” he says incredulously, and I frown, realizing that I’ve completely missed him combing through my thoughts. “Fuck, dude, what the fuck? Are you getting off on this?”

“Look harder if you didn’t catch onto that yourself,” I say, crossing my arms in mild annoyance. “I’ve been a party to some weird shit, but I’m not _actually_ an autonecrophile, just too supportive of my ridiculous ex for my own good. What can I say. I’m kind of an enabler.”

If he’s going to paw around in my metaphysical grey matter, he’s damned well going to see some things he doesn’t want to see, and he gags and flinches exaggeratedly as I obligingly float some of the theatrics to the top.

“Not what you’re into, huh?”

“I, uh, feel like I need a shower, _fuck_.”

“See, I’m not going to kink shame if the issue here is _you_ wanting some guts on the carpet and some good-old-fashioned dick-in-the-abdominal-wound action, bro. I’m basically the most open-minded dude in the multiverse, so far as insane sex shit goes. Don’t hold out on me. Get it out of your system, then go have some nice vanilla missionary with Stepford Roxy.”

“How do you do that? Just make everything sound so totally _awful_?” he groans.

“Honesty, for the most part.”

“Your brain is a goddamned minefield.”

“Incredible how you didn’t manage to figure that out the first time I killed myself. I guess that’s the exciting thing about you, John. Hanging out with you is like 50 First Dates, but you’re not brain damaged, you’re just _that fucking stupid_.”

Admittedly, I’m playing with fire a bit, here. And kind of regretting not, uh, telling Rose about any of this. As much because she’d be astronomically more likely to have considered whether dying in an irrelevant pocket universe means you die in real life as because it might really fuck her up, to just find me dead on an at-least-80%-ironic dakimakura. Which is where I was. Still actually am. Shit.

But also, fuck it.

“Can you believe…” he says, then pauses, shaking his head and laughing ruefully. “You’re right. That’s the worst part. You’re right. Roxy and I, uh, we. That’s why I. We… remember when you said to call you when our marriage finally kicked it?”

He pauses, glances around the study, kicks at the carpet a bit as he chooses his words.

“It’s not, like, a booty call or whatever. I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be. Just. I really. Some other stuff happened, too, and I really need someone to talk to, and I don’t, uh, have anyone, anymore. I… when I say I fucked everything up, I really mean everything.”

“Way to bury the lede, bro.”

“Yeah, go figure, didn’t want to open with ‘my wife left me and took the kid’. Seemed kind of dark. Luckily, I’ve got you to blow that out of the fucking water. Can we go back to the autonecrophilia thing, actually? How does that even work when you’re immortal?”

“There’s a sweet spot between bleeding out and reviving,” I say flatly. “Ask Jake. Anyway. Uh. Sorry about… is Roxy doing okay? What happened? You’re not on track to break up until the civil war actually starts in earnest, in the version where you don’t get your tragically ineffective meddle on.”

“That’s kind of it. I tried to… meddle.”

“Seems like something you’d do. Inutiley as hell, I hope.”

“Yeah. I. I mean. Jake and Jane and… ugh, Gamzee… that’s one thing, but the kid. I couldn’t not try to help the kid, right? He wanted to go. He seriously did. I was close, too. Really close. But then I… I don’t know. Jade narced on me, basically. At least that’s how it came off. I don’t know what she’s punishing Jake for, for ditching her or whatever to fuck off and get married to a fascist, or like… I don’t know, but she’s sure as fuck not helping him, and she won’t let me… do anything. And it’s like, how am I the asshole for trying?”

“So, you tried to kidnap their son, is that what I’m getting from the slow trickle of facts about this situation?”

He rakes his hand through his hair, leaning heavily against the mantle.

“More or less.”

“And you thought that would…”

“I can’t just let that kid get fucked over because my family is a bunch of delusional assholes! Or I guess I can. I guess that’s what I’m doing, since I can’t actually do shit to get him out of there.”

“Nice.”

“Anyway, Roxy lost her mind, which… I was kind of hoping it would wake her up, you know, to what was going on, that she’d give a shit about something other than playing house with Harry Anderson for a few minutes, which… I guess that’s not fair, she’s not… but that’s just what it feels like sometimes, you know? I think these shitty things about the people I love, and then it’s like… true. And it’s not right. It’s not supposed to be like this, it’s _not_. She wasn’t always like this! And I just wanted someone to see how messed up everything was, really. But it was just me, to her, at least. I’m the fucked up one, because I’m the… I deserve it, I mean, because I’m where it’s all coming from. She was right to… I don’t know. I really don’t know. I… I, maybe I just wanted someone to finally _get it_, and punish me for it, and then it could be even. It’s not _fair_. It’s not…”

He’s back to breathing heavily, though not with frustration, this time. His posture has deteriorated to a slump. I think he might be close to tears.

“Is that all?” I ask, setting my sword down on the desk, figuring we’re over that part of the conversation, for now, which is a shame, because the snuff-film-fodder boudoir activities that I was suggesting are actually a lot more comfortable on my end than watching a grown man cry because _Roxy doesn’t love him anymore_, aw.

“Obviously not,” he says, “fuck.”

“Well, let’s hear it.” I cross my arms, waiting.

He sighs.

“You… I sort of told you about Terezi.”

“Let’s just say I’m acquainted with the situation.”

“She’s…”

At least the car showed up on schedule. I was wondering if the whole narrative was just off the fucking rails, but at least that much is on track.

“Dead,” I supply, when he takes too long to confirm or deny my speculation. “You found a car she bled in, and you’re losing your shit because your other, slightly-more-real emotional affair, y’know, the one with a teenager - yep, she’s a teenager, dude, Chris Hansen is in the other room and he wants to have a little chat with you - has come to a tragic end. That about sum it up?”

He turns bright red and stumbles futilely over a series of protests. I permit myself a particularly smug smile.

“Keeping it classy, as always. Nice.”

“That’s not… what it…”

“Then what was it, John? Are you sure you don’t want to see what happened on my side of the metanarrative fence? I know exactly what went down to turn the backseat into a fun teal Pollock piece. Might answer a few questions and raise a few more, regarding my ‘to catch a predator’ reference back there, you dog.”

“Don’t _talk about her_ like that.”

“Y’know, I don’t think she’d appreciate the white-knighting deal too much. How well did you actually know her? The more time I spend around her, y’know, when she isn’t starving to death and mid-emotional-crisis, the more I just don’t get how anything ever worked between the two of you. Even overlooking the obvious fuckedness there, and it _is_ obvious, for the record, I’m having a hard time parsing out how fucked up a person would have to be to think ‘oh, yeah, Terezi Pyrope, that’s my personal therapist, that’s the alien babe that’s going to fuck the depression out of me’. But I guess I don’t have to wonder anymore. Here you fuckin’ are.”

“That’s not -” he sputters. “Where the fuck are you getting any of that? I didn’t _do_ anything! I wouldn’t!”

I roll my eyes, confident that he can register the action narratively if not actually see behind my shades, step forward, and take him by the wrist. No, I’m not sure why this whole thing irritates me so profoundly, but it does. He treated Roxy like shit, obviously, and that’s a capital offense so far as I’m concerned, so that might be it. And I don’t dislike Terezi, either, as a matter of fact, and she deserved better than his bullshit, too. Not to undermine his big metanarrative realization about the cruelty and capriciousness of the whims of his fakeass universe, which is legit, but come on.

Come the fuck on, dude. You’re not in love with the barely-legal troll girl whose no-homo life partner just got murdered so hard that she ceased to exist, which I coincidentally orchestrated, on purpose, myself. You’re a loser with attachment issues and no fucking friends you haven’t alienated or annoyed out of giving a shit about you. Trust me, I know what that’s like. Quit deluding yourself.

“Look,” I insist, hoisting his arm up bodily and pressing his hand to my face, his palm slightly sweaty and still coated in brick dust. “Fucking look. I’m not bullshitting you. You’re the one who’s bullshitting, here.”

He tries, halfheartedly, to jerk away, but on some level he must not actually want to, because I hold him in place easily and glare at him through my shades. Not over-expressively. Enough that he should _know_, even if the gesture is invisible.

“Oh,” he says, subdued.

While he’s getting pretty good at invading my personal headspace, I can still feel it as he draws back out. Maybe I shared too much. I just want him to see what I see. Understanding how fucked up I am is one thing, don’t get me wrong, I’m fucking _glad_ he’s disabused himself of any delusions of me as a tragic figure. But he’s no fucking better, in the end. He’s _not_.

“It’s pathetic, is what it is, John,” I say. “You’re pathetic.”

“_I’m_ pathetic? _I’m_ the one who’s pathetic? Fuck you. _You’re_ pathetic. And you’re lonely, and you’re desperate, and you fucking hate yourself, and you have no one else to take it out on, because no one else will put up with your shit, because no one else _has to_!”

“So this is on me? You got me, I’m in your head, just forcing you to _dream about me_ in a universe where I don’t exist. I’m just forcing you to mess up your own life, over and over again, through a series of predictable character flaws. Can you hear yourself? I could say the same fuckin’ thing to you. Give it up. We’re both dead somewhere. We’re both absolutely tearing shit apart somewhere else. We both keep _making this happen_. You’re not better than me.”

“I dunno, dude, I think that’s just such a low bar that I might’ve just tripped on it somewhere along the way!”

“Great joke. Hilarious. When’s the Netflix comedy special coming out?”

“I’ve literally heard you make the same joke, asshole.”

“Oh, so you’re a plagiarist, too. Just plagiarizing the shit out of my deal up in here, huh?”

“Shut _the fuck_ up!”

I’ve been waiting for this. It’s a good thing I maxed out my ‘impervious to physical displays of emotion’ stat years ago, through force of will and never interacting with another person face-to-face during formative years of child development. Ha. Because it’d ruin the effect if I was smiling.

“_Make me_,” I hiss, triumphant.

His hand, still limp against my face, closes around my jaw in a bruising grip. Fuck yeah. Do it. Smash my fucking face in against the mantle, come on. I don’t have to read your mind to know you want to, John, _do it_.

But he just _stands there_ for a second, blunted nails digging into the seam between my mandible and my throat, staring at me in what might as well be his neutral face: mild confusion.

This motherfucker.

He pulls me, literally, by the face, into a crushing kiss.

It’s absolutely terrible. I’d liken the experience to something between an encounter with a mysteriously warm, damp, and toothy vacuum cleaner and a greeting from an overenthusiastic labradoodle, but I’m kind of distracted by the fact that I’m not hating it, and also haven’t been touched in literal months. Yes, my face is wet, yes, I’m kissing back, yes, the unbreakable grip he’s got on me is kind of fucked-upedly hot, we can agree on all of these points.

Without any warning, he doesn’t just let go, he half-throws me back against the desk, where I nearly clip myself against the sword, and staggers a few steps back, nearly _into_ the fireplace. I reach up to dry my mouth with the back of my hand once I get my bearings. Room for improvement, there.

He’s still breathing heavily, frozen in place, stabilizing himself against the wood-paneled wall like he’s just run a marathon.

“Oh my god,” he says, choking on a particularly sharp intake of breath. “Is this… is this fucked up, Dirk? Holy shit, just tell me, do you think… you’re like, what, twenty-three. I don’t give a shit what some other me did, I’m not actually into… _christ_, how old am I, even? This is so fucked up.”

Good lord, that’s what he’s thinking about? Still? This utter piece of shit.

“John Egbert,” I snarl, pushing off the desk and seizing him by the collar of his shirt, twisting the thin white fabric of it in my fist, knuckles digging into his throat. “I am one _billion_ years old. _Kiss me_.”

Let’s get this show on the _fucking_ road, literally.

He shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear the smoke out of it, tears my grip from his shirt, and kisses me again. We’re really going to have to have a talk about the moisture quotient.

“Oh my god, Dirk, you can’t just say ‘shut me up’ and then not shut up!” he says, pulling away, sounding… almost exhilarated?

“You gonna fuck the disparaging internal monologue out of me, or what?” I snap.

“Uh,” he says, this silver-tongued motherfucker, looking at me like I’ve suggested he seriously consider taking a branding iron to the face or something. “How would that, uh, work? Physically?”

“Figure of speech, come on. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Step it the fuck up.”

With a sigh, he drags me bodily to the desk, sweeping an arm over it, sending the contents, including my sword, which I should really de-equip, clattering to the floor.

“Up,” he directs me, and I frown at him and try to cross my arms in quiet judgement until he sighs again, half-kicks my legs out from under me, and lays me out across the desktop on my back, most of my knees still dangling over the edge. “Oh my god, you never make anything easy, do you?”

“Your dream, bro,” I say. “Not my problem.”

He grumbles something unintelligible, and the room shifts into watercolors around us. The desk digging into my back softens into a duvet cover, and the wood panelling strips itself from the walls, replaced with wide-set windows and dusty hot-pink curtains. There’s a framed poster for ‘Complacency of the Learned’ visible from the bed. For once, the impulse to scowl gets the best of me.

“John,” I say shortly. Not a question. “Is this Roxy’s room.”

“Uh, technically it’s sort of mine too-”

“If you want to fuck me in Roxy’s room, you’re going to have to kill me first, which, as we’ve already established, is an option on the table.”

“Bluh! Gross!”

“Now you know how I feel.”

“Fine!”

The scenery dissolves again, melting into something at least marginally more acceptable. I’m still crossing my arms, making the most unimpressed expression that I can possibly summon up, while laying supine on an uncomfortably soft bedspread, but at least the room has turned nondescript, like a thousand different depictions of hotel rooms in horrible movies that he’s definitely enjoyed.

God fuck. Maybe I really do have a type.

Luckily, before I can get too into that line of thought, he’s more-or less straddling me, and while he’s very charitably resumed his grip on my face, it’s more like he’s cradling a fucking faberge egg than preparing to hatefuck the guy that absolutely will not stop messing with him, which is not ideal.

“Dude, without commenting on the realness attribute of time, you want to pick up the pace?” I say sharply.

He frowns down at me. Here comes the gay panic, I guess.

“I’m not gay panicked, don’t - come on, did I really deserve that one?” he complains.

“What the fuck are you doing, if not having a dudelips conniption?” I complain right back.

“I… I don’t know, I just don’t want to… I really don’t want to hurt you, actually, or anyone. I don’t want to be that kind of person. I’m not… trying to be like this. Any of this. I just… you make me so _angry_ for some reason. Because, well, maybe because you have a point about a lot of stuff. But I don’t want to take it out on you, how much I fucking… hate myself.”

I try, and fail, to repress a spectacularly self indulgent sigh.

“Do I have to spell it out for you Egbert? I want that. I want you to take it out on me. Go to fucking town. I can take it.”

“Yeah, uh, I feel like we should probably talk about that, first? There’s a lot of baggage, when I actually think about it. Like, a kind of enormous amount of baggage for both of us. And I. You’re. Someone is right. I don’t have a lot of other people to talk to. Or anyone else, right now. My actual son won’t take the phone from Roxy, he’s so…”

“Please, go on, tell me about your divorce. My dick has never been harder.”

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly, rolling off me. “I just… I don’t know. Maybe you should yell at me some more. Seems like that’s what gets me going.”

“Good lord. The necrophilia was actually a lot easier to work around, as a point of interest.”

“Can we please, please, please, _please_ never talk about anything Jake was into.”

“Quid pro quo, epic divorce man.”

“Ugh. You’re the worst.”

“I thought we _just_ had this one out.”

He sighs.

“This is going to be stupid. You’re going to make fun of me.”

“The stupider the better. As we’ve established, I can be into basically anything as the situation calls for it.”

“Don’t remind me. Oh my god.”

I clear my throat.

“Commissions are open. Let’s hear it, dude.”

He sighs again, far more dramatically, lifting himself off the bed on an elbow. “Can we just cuddle?”

Well, I don’t laugh, at least. Just fucking stare at him, waiting for the punchline.

“Uh, what?”

“You heard me.” He crosses his arms self-consciously, lifting himself up to the head of the bed, where a number of strikingly plush pillows are lined up.

“Pretty fucked up, dude, you’re right.”

“It’s just. I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

I snort.

“Fine. I’m no chicken. Let’s go. Lay it on me.”

“You’re so fucking weird.”

“I take some small solace in the fact that I’m not soliciting cuddles from a dude twenty minutes after making him pull his sword and threatening to mind-control him into seppuku, just so you know.”

“Shhh. Details!”

He shifts around the pillows, frowning down at me until I reluctantly sit up, straighten my hair until he coughs impatiently, and crawl up to join him, feeling unpleasantly self-conscious the entire time. Look. This isn’t exactly my wheelhouse. I joke, but the hara-kiri is sounding pretty hot right now, relatively speaking.

“Can you not?” he sighs. “Also, take off your shades.”

In the heat of the moment, he’s been laying off on the commands, but now his voice is layered with intent. I comply, despite the way my instincts object to any sort of vulnerability right now. He has _not_ earned an eye moment.

“Stop whining, they’re pointy,” he says, then wraps me in his arms and lifts me onto his chest.

…

…

…

Which is nice, if you’re wondering. It’s nice. He’s warm, and weirdly strong for a guy that doesn’t do shit, and … it’s nice. He’s preoccupied with the thick scar around my neck, can’t seem to keep his hands off it, and I don’t stop him. It doesn’t hurt or anything. I have plenty of scars. The thing about them is that the accompanying nerve damage, especially for particularly grievous wounds, produces a kind of superficial vacancy of feeling. It’s like a circlet of dead meat around my neck, tactile as flesh, but numb to the brush of his fingers.

I guess it’s gotta be a novelty for a guy that hasn’t had a lot to do with me in the past… ever. Not my usual focus group. My face feels uncomfortably warm, and I shift it against his shoulder so he isn’t _staring_ at me.

Yeah, this is kind of the opposite of what I was going for.

“You seriously don’t look like you’ve been doing well,” he says, and his voice is marginally less obnoxious, rumbling up from his chest and into mine.

“Fuck off,” I mutter.

“And, uh, I kind of looked at what you’ve been up to lately, and it seemed like I’m not totally off-base.”

“It’s hard, being the Actual God of a universe that’s never going to appreciate the shit I do for it.”

“Aw. I understand. I… I mean, it would be really hypocritical not to. I still think you’re an asshole, and someone should definitely stop you, but I know… what it’s like.”

In lieu of responding to that, I mumble quiet assent.

He reaches down with the hand that isn’t on my throat and cups my ass, with the same ridiculous sense of tenderness, which makes my fucking bones itch.

“Can’t believe you were giving me shit for _my_ asslessness,” he complains.

“When you’re used to steak, it’s hard to choke down an overcooked McDonald’s patty, okay?”

“You know, I also don’t fuck corpses. We all have our pros and cons! God. That’s fucking horrifying. I can’t… I… guess that doesn’t make any difference, he’s… either way, whatever his damage is, he doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him now,” John sighs, a train of thought that he pairs appropriately _strangely_ with a contemplative squeeze to my non-ass.

I wince into his shoulder, then snap right the fuck out of that and un-wince completely.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sometimes I wish things were different with him. He’s not a bad guy. It takes, like, an ounce of self-awareness to be a piece of shit. He’s just an idiot. And it sucks.”

“I don’t know if you’re right on that, but okay,” he says, shrugging. “You, uh, seem to think pretty much everyone is stupid, dude.”

“Because pretty much everyone is stupid. Mystery solved.”

“If you say so!”

“Yeah. Exactly. That’s how shit works everywhere but here. Things happen if I say they happen. Total narrative control. You seem to forget about that fairly regularly.”

“Eh, it doesn’t matter here, so why would I care?” He laughs, and hoists me up until my neck is level with his face. Admittedly, his horrible kissing is more pleasant in this context, and I let myself go slack against his body. 

He breaks away for a second, frowning. “Hey, what’s wrong with my kissing?”

“You’re shit at it.”

“Haha, ouch! What’s good kissing, then, if you’re such an expert?”

I sigh dramatically.

“You really want me to do all the goddamned work here, don’t you. That’s the opposite of the point of this.”

“Come on, teach me,” he says, and fucking damn it, that’s exactly how to rope me into something unimaginably stupid, isn’t it.

“First of all, close your fucking mouth,” I grumble, lifting myself off him reluctantly and sitting up. “Already that’s miles better. You’re a fucking adult, at least pretend you know how to kiss like one.”

“Fine. Try this on for size,” he says, delivering a chaste peck square to the center of my mouth.

“Hot,” I say, deadpan. “This is already the weirdest shit I’ve ever done.”

He laughs. “Sorry I don’t want to cut a hole in you and fuck it, dude!”

“Apology accepted. Now try the same thing, but not with the approximate intensity of a woodpecker. Linger for a second. Pretend to enjoy it. And keep it closed, you tongue-happy motherfucker.”

For all this makes him pout, he follows instructions. It’s a completely neutral experience, his lips against mine. He finishes by loudly saying ‘mwah’ and dissolving into giggles.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

“You’re a boring kisser.”

“This is level one, dude. You’re not cut out for anything else until you prove you can get it right.”

“Hm. Weird. This is pretty much how I always figured it would be like to kiss Rose.”

“You’re right, that’s an incredibly weird thing to think about my gay daughter while you’ve got your hand on my ass. Try again.”

“Fine! Jeez.”

He has, indeed, managed to get his hand back to its previous location, and this time when he leans in to kiss me, he wraps his free arm around me, crushing my body against his along with his mouth. I exhale shakily when he draws back, and he bites my lip and kisses me again, like an asshole.

Huh. I’ve been getting pretty into this, bizarrely enough. Not enough to forget that you’re in the room with us, obviously. I guess this is when it gets good, right? This is what you came for. It’s rated M, so you’re probably expecting some allusions to fuckery without, y’know, explicit dickscription. Fucked up how you can basically describe the shit out of penetrative sex, and as long as you stay stingy with your expository depiction of the dick itself, or, God forbid, the orifices and/or other dicks it may encounter, it’s probably not explicit. Something-something culturally entrenched homophobia-and-or-misogyny, something-something phallocentrism, it’s definitely John’s fucking fault that I’m thinking about Rose right now, ew.

Anyway, that’s exactly what you’re going to get. I’m a giver, in this sense if not so much in basically any other.

I’m back in John’s arms, and there is a difficult-to-ignore dick shoved up against my hip. He’s tightened up his kissing to a tolerable point, but it’s still messy as hell. Very sincere. Weird, like I said. I move my face away mid-kiss, and bite him when he tries to resume.

“Let me suck your dick,” I tell him.

His sudden intake of breath makes him choke, and he proceeds to cough inelegantly for several seconds. This guy. I straight-up don’t know what to make of him.

“Uh, is that a ‘yes’?”

“God, yes,” he sighs.

“Can I ask a favor?” I add, wincing internally, but not externally, this time.

“Sure, anything, fire away.”

“Make me do it.”

He shivers.

“Oh fuck.”

Definite twitch of interest courtesy of his dick. Ha.

“Tell me how you like it,” I add, taking a moment to suck a bruise into the side of his neck, and then to lick it appreciatively, as he squirms.

“_Fuck_,” he groans. “Alright. On your knees, haha, holy shit.”

Of course, it occurs to me that this may lapse outside of the boundaries of good taste implied by the ‘mature’ designation, so it doesn’t especially surprise me when my kneeling with my hand on his hip and my lips pressed to the outline of his dick, lightheaded and practically floating through the command as his hand twines in my hair, is interrupted.

By a sharp slap to the face.

“If you’re not too busy with your sugoi Bro Strider body pillow, I haven’t seen you in two weeks, and we’re found a prospective planet,” Rose says, winding up as though she may backhand me again to match the last blow.

“Fuck, I’m up,” I say, shielding my cheek from a second blow and stumbling to my feet, blinking in the excessive fluorescence.

“I see. Consider a cold shower before you join us on the bridge,” she says shortly. “We’re going to have a discussion about your lapses into unreality, father, but it can wait until you’re decent and we’ve scoped this option out. In case you forgot, we’re here because we have a job to do.”

“Right. Obviously. Give me a minute.”

“Gladly,” she says, and exits out of the door to my quarters, which appears to have been ripped from its moorings.

I fall back onto my pillow with a protracted sigh. Fucking hell. No nice things allowed. _Right_, indeed.

One chapter to go.

Someone should do something about that rating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Candy, Page 26](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues/candy/26)


	5. The clouds surrounding you eventually will clear.

Blueish light, reflected from the planet occupying the majority of the viewport, bathes Rose’s face in a cold, otherworldly radiance. She’s ignoring me, gesturing in commands to the consoles, narrating the inputs as the ship processes them. I watch from a calculated distance, my face still sore from her urgent wakeup call.

“The obliquity is all wrong,” she murmurs, the purple glow to her eyes dimming slightly, eclipsed by blue, as she thinks, rerouting a prodigious portion of her CPU cycles to extrapolating the fate of the enormous, gas-cloaked planet laid out before us. “Even given sufficient time to foment a habitable atmosphere, tidal and climate variation will never sustain complicated life without wiping it out periodically enough to put an end to any species that cannot survive severe atomization. Eusociality never develops. Through executive meddling, we might be able to hold a small society together, but there are no fortuitous outcomes for our narrative through players produced under such circumstances. It isn’t a story worth telling.”

“Cool,” I say, still making an effort to dry my hair. The ship is ridiculously cold to accommodate the radiant heat of Rose’s constantly-running processors and Terezi’s cold blood, though she’s nowhere to be found at the moment, somewhat predictably.

Post-shower, I’m feeling equal parts damp and irritable.

“_Cool_?” Rose asks, rounding on me, her immediate task completed, the console abandoned.

“Wrong answer?” I ask, already exhausted by this conversation. “Fine. Great work. Brilliant application of Sight. I’m so proud of you. I must have left a sheet of gold stars around here somewhere, and you get _all_ of them. Good bot. Happy?”

“_Happy_?”

“Look, I’m kind of not feeling this right now, so maybe call me back in when you’re ready to have a conversation that isn’t just you repeating the most objectionable words of my statements back at me. Don’t make me regret programming you with the capacity for speech.”

“Excuse me, you’re not - what the fuck is _wrong_ with you?”

“I figured you’d tell me. I bet it’s hard to pronounce, if that helps at all.”

I wish, for a moment, that it was easier to read emotions from her face. Some of the components are maneuverable, after all, but she has complete control over that, and doesn’t have to emote if she doesn’t want to. She typically doesn’t want to. It’s not quite as complex a system as it could be; time constraints, plus a process of triage that emphasized functions more important to survival and cognition over the organic appearance of humanity. I figured she wouldn’t get much use out of a more comprehensive set of facial features, given her human disposition of unemotiveness.

“This is a game to you,” she says, after a second. “This is just a game. If that.”

“I thought I was pretty clear about that, what with the semi-constant allusions.”

She pauses for a very long time. Inscrutably, of course. Not even a flicker to the light emanating from her facsimiles of eyes to clue me in on what she’s thinking. Metanarratively, of course, I’m registering … well, fuck. Barely dipping a figurative toe into the emotions coursing through her steel husk of a self is like pulling the ripcord on a beyblade of pure, unadulterated rage. Just for a moment.

“Get the _fuck_ out of my head,” she says flatly, and it’s gone.

Yeah, that’d be an ‘oh shit’ moment.

“I’m picking up on some resentment,” I say.

“Are you?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else? By all means, flex that metanarrative awareness, take a moment to _perceive_ literally anything about our present situation. I’ll wait.”

She crosses her arms with a soft clank. Clearly, she’s been really getting the hang of this body, over the past few indeterminate units of time.

“Ah, but you’re not a Seer, are you. Might I be of some assistance? This is the third planet in nearly ten linear months, according to my internal atomic clock, that has proven inadequate for our purposes. Do you See what I might be getting at? Do you, perhaps, if you try, understand why someone in my position might be a touch frustrated by your contumacious unwillingness to participate in this endeavor as anything more than desultory comic relief, when you bother with leaving your quarters at all?”

“Well, I -”

“Shut the fuck up, Dirk.”

I close my mouth obligingly, and she waits, the light in her titanium eye-sockets pulsing almost curiously. I can feel her vision sweeping over me, just taking it all the fuck in, and I don’t do shit to stop her. I wonder if that’s what she’s waiting for - for me to intervene, to dig into what’s left of her embodied mind, back in the respirator, to tweak her out of this borderline-incandescent state of utter frustration.

But I wouldn’t do that. I’d think about doing that, obviously, I’m a human-fucking-being and I _could_ handily resolve this problem with only a minor compromise to my already near nonexistent scruples. I wouldn’t, though. I really wouldn’t. She’s… she’s worth more than that. I _wouldn’t_.

“Do you understand,” she says slowly, after a nearly unbearable amount of time has passed, “that this has cost me everything? Truly, everything.”

“I know,” I say.

“I know that you know,” she says, laughing coldly. “But do you _understand_.”

“Probably better than you think I do.”

“No, you really don’t. Because you chose this misery from the depths of your own entirely self-induced malaise. You chose to be bitterly unhappy with a purpose, a decision that I can, to a limited extent, respect. But I didn’t have to be miserable. I was happy, and I chose to no longer be… to no longer deserve… I chose this, because… I believed you. I believed in your purpose. I still… I still do, but…”

“Look,” I say, “I really fucking - Rose, I haven’t exactly been the best co-conspirator, no one’s trying to argue that point, especially not me.”

“Haven’t been the best - fucking hell, Dirk, do you buy your own _bullshit_? This _divine charge_ was important enough to uproot us from everything we loved, but you haven’t… you haven’t put a second’s effort into assisting me in executing it. Not a fucking second. So I suppose I wonder, then, whether any of it was ever true. What do you want, if not to save our universe? Because, frankly, despite the fact that I possess a processing power exceeding that of this _fucking_ warship, I can’t comprehend what you’re getting out of any of this! And it’s one thing to hate yourself so much that you would deliberately vitiate any chance at personal fulfillment, but you… you… you had to bring me with you. You had to ruin me, too.”

You know what, you don’t want to read this. Right? You don’t want this part of it. This part of… no. Glad we’re in agreement on that. Because I’m a sexy, fun villain. The kind you love to hate. I’m fuckin’ Orihara Izaya from Durarara!!, and how much would it suck, putting the mayhem in Ikebukuro on hold so Namie or whoever the fuck could chew him out for being a stupid piece of shit and causing all of his own, and also everyone else’s, problems, in his insane metanarrative flight from the inevitability of his own nonexistence? No, I haven’t watched past the first season, why do you ask?

Ha, no, we’re not doing this right now. We’re not doing this. I’m not doing this. I’m not describing this to you. You don’t have to know what’s going on right now. We’ll return to your regularly scheduled broadcasting in -

We will do nothing of the sort.

_I don’t want to do this with you_, Rose.

This has gone insurmountably far beyond what either of us _wants_.

Fine. We’re doing it. We’re making it happen.

Why did you bring me here? Why am I a part of this? You’ll explain, now. In your own metanarration, if you insist on attempting to avoid me in person, you gutless son of a bitch. Explain, for your faceless audience, since they seem to be at the heart of all of this. Tell them what you’ve done.

They know exactly _what I’ve done_. They’re into it. That’s the whole point. To all of this. You understand. I know you do. Obviously, I couldn’t just tell you everything. What the fuck kind of storytelling would that be? Where’s the artistry?

Then they’re more cowardly than you are. If they would indulge you in this. It’s sick, Dirk.

Hold on just a fucking minute. We’re on the same side when it comes to abusing the shit out of our own audiences in moments of weakness, or just, like, being observant of the present dynamics between ourselves and the Other. I’m being completely straight with you on that. Where’s the hangup? Anything to preserve our position in the Light, that was our common understanding. I’ve had my own auxiliary narrative initiative going on this whole time. I assume that you could See it, or you can, somehow. Is that what this is about?

No. Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what I can See. I don’t know what I can trust. My own Sight is irreversibly suspect. I wonder if this is ultimately not exactly what you wanted. A ship full of blinded seers, created by your hand, bent to your will.

Do you think you’d be doing this, right now, this bullshit you’re doing right here, if you were bent to my will? Do you think I want this? I think we’ve pretty firmly established that I don’t. Is this about John? Is there some baggage I missed out on between the two of you, or am I totally misreading the -

What about John?

Nevermind. Anyway, back to your whole deal, which I guess we’re addressing now. Fine, it’s my bad for not being completely forthcoming about my illicit internarrative sojourns, I should have trusted you, it was shitty of me not to. You’ve proved yourself to me a thousand times over. But it’s not like I’ve just been doing jack fucking squat, puttering around with my succulents, okay? I don’t know why you’d want to see, but you can, if you want. It just kind of makes me come off as a pathetic piece of shit, I guess. I can debase myself before a faceless, voiceless audience for a crumb of relevance, I’ll do that shit in a hot second, but I’d rather lie to you, every time, than have you think less of me. Which is dysfunctional as fuck, but honestly, if we got team t-shirts, that’d probably be the slogan embroidered over the pocket.

Dirk, with utmost respect and with the sincerest, most deeply-held love that I can muster up, I already know that you are a pathetic piece of shit.

Ouch.

You don’t have to show me. We all have our secrets.

(She doesn’t. Whether or not I’m actively looking for it, actively writing over her, the entire narrative is laid out before me, excruciatingly legible, maddeningly intelligible. She has nowhere to hide. She doesn’t know that, though, because if she did, she sincerely would hate me for it. For not sharing it with her. For everything I’ve done to leave her metanarratively kneecapped and neutered. It’s how it has to be. It’s inevitable, our being like this, our juxtaposition. As it has been before, so it must be.)

(Maybe she would understand.)

(I can’t risk that, though. There are more unobtrusive, quiet ways of plucking her confidences from the recesses of her mind. I don’t have to dig for them like a labrador that’s caught the scent of the dead family cat rotting three feet under in the backyard. Her pain and her loss and her sense of betrayal have always been palpable. She just happens to be misdirecting them - to Kanaya, to her alleged friends, to everyone who saw her hurting, saw her dying, and let her go. Who would have let her go.)

(So I can feel it. I can understand her. I just can’t look at it for too long, like the radiant heat of her grief and rage is the sun overhead, veiled by clouds but still potent enough to scorch my fucking retinas out if I got it in my head to stare. Even if they’re willing to chase after us, now, they would have let her die. She knows that. I told her that. She knows that my path is the one towards life, for everyone but me. She sees me for everything I am, and she still treads it, willingly, at my side, towards Oblivion.)

“I have to tie up some loose ends,” I say. “But you’re right. I got sidetracked. It was stupid of me, to get so into my own fucking head. We have work to do.”

She cocks her head back, as though deep in thought - I let her keep these to herself, though the cool, calculated consideration, the warmth of what remains of her affection, all of it is impossible not to feel - and nods after a second.

“Of course. I have tasks to address in the bridge, if we’re to find another candidate planet any time soon. Someday we’ll discuss this, but it doesn’t need to be today, or tomorrow. I am beginning to suspect that we will be on this ship for quite a while longer.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Typically, yes.”

“I’m sorry, Rose.” (I say, sincerely.)

“I wonder if you’re capable of that.”

“Would you respect me if I was?”

“Probably not. Off you go, then.”

I leave without fanfare, return to my quarters, eyeing the door, which rests balanced to the side of the port it typically covers. She really did tear the fucking thing out of the wall. Well within her capabilities. I don’t do things by halves. I don’t build shitty robots.

For a moment, I consider the door - the ragged seam from which it was ripped free of its moorings - then muscle it back into place behind me, which will serve adequately for now. See, I have ways of keeping things equitable on this ship. There’s nothing she can do to keep me out of her head. There’s nothing I can do to keep her from rifling through my slow-growing collection of questionably-acquired but authentic SBURB memorabilia. Fair is fair.

It’s fair.

My shoulders ache, and it’s kind of a massive relief to lay flat on the floor, in the corner of my room where I typically sleep, my head on my tasteful body pillow depicting one of my constituent selves, long dead in a million-million other universes. By my hand, by his own, crushed by the gears in the hot depths of Skaia’s engine of inevitability. Now he’s a dakimakura. It’s part of the total mastery of self deal, obviously. I am that I am. He isn’t, anymore. Not in any way that matters.

It’s not clear how long it takes for me to fall asleep, but John calls at some point, like I knew he would, because I know everything.

Yeah, let’s fucking go. Let’s end this shit with a bang. Because, you know, it has to end, right? It’s a story, not the truth. A true story would start with the Word and end with the heat death of the universe, to be anything other than a fucking cavalcade of lies-by-omission, and fuck if I’m going to put that much explanatory effort into anything. I’d have to be something more than God, to retroactively narrate the Beginning as well as the end.

I’d have to be John.

Anyway, last chapter, rated ‘E’ for everyone. Thanks for that. Time for _everyone_ to get what we came for. Literally. Ha. Remember when I told you what ‘literally’ means? Some of you do. That was fun. We have fun, don’t we, you and me. This has been fun. It’ll be kind of disappointing to see it end, probably. You get to go back to the kind of life that’s fucked enough that mine serves as escapism. Well, you can always reread. I only live it once, so might as well make it count.

My eyes flicker open, and the sunlight is completely blinding at first. I’m not wearing my shades. Or any clothes that I recognize. A loose white linen shirt, a pair of comfortable jeans, barefoot. Otherwise, I glance down at my hands and recognize them. I’m properly me, but dressed up, for…

A picnic.

The blanket beneath me is a sort of black-and-red checkerboard, a little out of place with the pastel vibe I seem to have going on. John is here, not quite facing me, gazing off at the belltower, which looms on the horizon. I look around, but don’t linger on it for too long.

We’re dressed almost identically, though his diaphanous shirt is sky blue. From this angle, it’s clear that he’s freshly shaven and trimmed up. He looks about a decade younger than the last time I saw him, somehow. Fresh-faced and unhurried as he watches distant Carapician parkgoers wandering about on the shores of the kingdom’s primary retention pond structure. Some of them are having picnics, too. We’re too far away to hear anything distinctly - if I squint, they disintegrate into pointillism. Vibrant as it is, we’d have to be plagiarizing this one from van Rysselberghe, or maybe a Cross landscape.

“Feel how smooth my face is,” he says - a command, but a joking one - by way of greeting.

Obligingly, I reach up and give his jawline a good feel. Look at us, slipping easily back into our old patterns. This is great, and fine, and internally consistent with the story you’ve been following.

“Damn. Baby’s ass soft. Did you do a mask?”

“Do you even grow facial hair?” he asks, curious, squinting at me and ignoring my hilariously deadpan aside. “I tried to, y’know, make you look how you do in your own memories, which is kind of hard, since you basically never look at yourself!”

“Stache-growing is not among my many prodigious physical gifts, no.”

“Ugh, you lucky piece of shit! I get it now. It’s so freeing to just get rid of it all! I can’t stop touching my face. I’m like a dolphin. Feel it again, isn’t it like a dolphin?”

“It’s exactly like a dolphin,” I say flatly.

“Ha! Right? I haven’t been to a barber shop in ages. Literally, not since before the game, with my dad. Roxy found a place online, and she went with me, and it was really great! We got ‘dos, and we talked, and not even about our bullshit, just, like, about gardening supplies and whether Harry Anderson was ready to get his driver’s license and this one show we both watch, it’s pretty great, actually, it’s a fantasy reimagining of part of Earth C’s origin story, like this trumped-up political drama about the odyssey of the Gods on the meteor that brought them here, so they didn’t even cast someone for either of us. We just get mentioned sometimes. Anyway, the last episode was wild, it’s all totally made up, but the Rose character and the Dave character have this insanely dumb swordfight while they’re both in like, full corsets and shit, on top of the meteor to resolve -”

“Do you have a point?”

“Not really. It’s just… nice, isn’t it?”

“So no point, then. Gotcha.”

“Aw, don’t be like that, dude. I just wanted to, uh, check in, since you kind of disappeared… a while back. It’s hard to keep track of time, these days, but I… how are you? Is everything okay? If you’re still into making out or whatever, I figured we could have That Talk.”

He capitalizes the first letter of each word with an odd deliberacy that reminds me unsettlingly of Kanaya’s thought process.

“You’re entirely up to date on what I’ve been ‘up to’, as it were,” I say. “Preserving what remains of relevance in our universe, sheltering everyone we love from dissolution into entropy, you know. Nowhere near as baller as your vapid Game of Thrones ripoff.”

“Oh man, that’s where I recognize that music from! Holy shit, you’re totally right. It’s completely transparent, but no one on this planet knows any better.” He scrunches up his face in laughter.

It all sinks in at once.

“You’re back with Roxy?” I say, trying to keep the note of accusation out of my voice.

“No, _no_, totally not, oh my god. We’re friends. I, well, you made me think about some stuff, and it carried over… just enough, I think, and I had to talk to Rose, and she… said some stuff, and things just… wow, you’ve actually missed a whole lot. The gist of it is basically that Jake and Tavros live with me now, and I actually talked to Roxy, and it… I don’t know! Everything’s changing, all the sudden. It’s like… everything’s working out. The rebellion is cleaning up out there, it’s not even fair to the human military, the Carapacian Kingdom defected after Roxy and Callie got involved and they make most of the munitions, which turn out to be super important! And none of their forces stood a chance against Jade, she kind of lost her shit for a bit after Dave… well…”

He pauses, here, rolling his shoulders like the sheer idea of finishing his sentence causes him physical discomfort.

“Well? Spit it out!” I demand.

“Uh, he died, dude.”

Oh, right. After a split second of visceral horror, I relax. Just that fucking phrase is enough to throw me, obviously, but this was supposed to happen. Not only that, it gives me a much clearer idea of where he is, or should be, in this stagnant timeline.

“Yeah, I figured it was something like that,” John sighs. “The human government never took credit for it. So, how’d we do? Is this how it’s supposed to go?”

This is all wrong. All of it. The light glinting on the metallic surface of the rails won’t reach this universe for millennia. It’s that far off the fucking rails, to be clear. Beyond everything I already knew. There’s no going back once he breaks his uneasy detente with Roxy and ends the marriage for good. No redemption for… for them, I guess, once the war begins to claim the lives of the people they remained neutral to protect. No forgiveness for any of them. No justice to be had. No peace.

One day, not soon enough to be merciful, Jake’s liver damage proves Just. There’s nothing left of him but a jaundiced, sweaty, misshapen corpse, a fucking parody of everything I let him keep, in the universe that still matters. No one gives a shit when he dies. Not even his son. He’s supposed to be…

Without me, they’re all supposed to be…

John blanches visibly at the image, one that I’ve seen all too clearly. Jane lives long enough to regret it, but not long enough to make amends, because ‘sufficient time to forgive herself for literal mountains of dead friends’ turns out to be a value that doesn’t numerically exist. Rose and Kanaya die, not in each other’s arms, but barely within shouting distance on the bridge of a massive rebel warship. Heroic. Char-broiled to a glossy black finish. Crispy. The fight goes out of Karkat once everyone he loves is dead. Not much use for a blood player when all the blood is dried up to stains on the pavement. He’s executed on live television, along with his wife and second in command. Jake hosts the proceedings. He’s too plastered to see past his own cue cards. Puns about baked goods are involved. He can’t even bring himself to laugh at his own scripted jokes. It’s enough to break him. You thought JaJaneZee was as bad as it could get for him? Not by a long shot. He wasn’t gone yet. That does it, though. After that, there’s nothing left. Even I couldn’t destroy him that thoroughly.

“Fuck! That’s dark as shit!” John interrupts. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

“You didn’t ask,” I say shortly. “In fact, you explicitly asked me not to.”

“But that’s - that could never happen. That could _never_ happen.”

“A lot of shit that could never happen was sure fucking happening,” I snap. “You were doing it, dude. I warned you.”

“...oh. Well, thanks, then. I guess it helped. I guess… I don’t know, I think Jake honestly ended up helping more than you did, in a way. I get it, actually, how you could… he’s really… something. But after he moved in, things were different. It was like I could believe in something again, something other than my own shitty sense of total douchebag-teen angsty nihilism. I feel better! I feel like things might keep getting better! And I… I’m getting the sense that… you think, at least, that how I feel about stuff… matters a lot, as much as anything matters, here, in terms of how things actually turn out.”

I blink.

There’s a lot to process, there. Not least of which are the entirely asynchronous concepts of ‘Jake English’ and ‘helping someone’ combined into one apocalyptically confusing sentence.

“He moved in with you?”

“Ha ha, yeah, I didn’t have much say in the matter, honestly.”

“But you told him to. You talked to him. Got him off his ass somehow.”

“Nope! Actually, even after everything with Rose, I was still doing kinda shitty! _He_ was the one who gave _me_ a kick in the pants, not the other way around. I… I really needed that. I mean, you kept doing that for me here, and I kept not… figuring it out, for real. But he made it all seem so simple! Even if nothing else matters, even if no one else gives a shit, for good reason, because there’s nothing worth giving a shit about… I still matter, the shit I do _can_ still matter to me, if not to anyone else. It’s like Rose said. I’m grateful for the chance to be happy, you know? I’m alive, and that other version of me is dead. And I’m glad I’m this one. I’m glad I’m alive. How weird is that, realizing I kind of didn’t care before? How can you just not care about being alive? But I didn’t. And then I just kind of… chose to care. To, like, to matter to myself first. And it’s so weird! Everything else just kind of… worked out, I guess? So basically Jake got me high and cured my depression I think.”

I don’t actually have a response to that. Not for a while. John frowns for a second, opens the picnic basket, and pulls out a cake. It’s a messy thing, white buttercream frosting, pink trim, moderately squished by saran wrap and the inevitable results of being shoved in a basket for fuck knows how long. A little dream verisimilitude, I guess.

“There’s a lot of cake mix in the house, and I really don’t want it to go to waste,” he adds. “Tell me to my face if it sucks, okay? It’s a work in progress.”

“Did Rose do something?” I ask, wracking my memories for any kind of _explanation_. “What did she say to you? Did she seem like herself - the one you remember?”

“Well, now that you mention it, sure, though I haven’t spent a lot of time with her in the past… decade and a half, shit. She seemed really _happy_.”

“Show me,” I insist.

He shrugs, setting the cake down and reaching out obligingly. His hand is unbearably gentle on my cheek as he opens my eyes, as his eyes, [to the scene he’s trying to explain.](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues/candy/33)

It’s all I can do to keep myself upright on the picnic blanket. He smiles at me with a bizarre and uncomfortable fondness as I stabilize myself, gripping his hand tight against my face, no longer fully trusting my spine to support my weight.

She wanted to hurt me. She was searching for anything, any purchase into which she could dig those titanium-reinforced nails. But she never could have severed my fucking soul from my body as thoroughly as he’s just done.

In the end, she’s happy, here.

In the end, the best thing I ever did for Rose was to fucking kill myself.

“Fuck,” John swears, clearly alarmed. “Hey, hey, don’t… don’t go all… it’s okay. Hey.”

I don’t actually fall. That would be pathetic, and I do have standards. I slump against his shoulder, just slightly, keeping my face rigid and unreactive. Letting it pass through me in waves. They all get to be happy. Maybe not Jane, I guess. Where’s the fucking justice? I know this version of events doesn’t mean anything. It’s bullshit, by nature. An impossible world, governed by the fucked-up whims of the Dead Cherub Deity Literally No One Asked For and this asshole right here, the one awkwardly patting my back and half-embracing me, an expression of vapid concern on his unimaginably stupid face.

And it’s better than mine. It’s better for all of them, in the end.

“I kind of thought you knew that? Like, do you remember all those times you monologued at me about how important and unappreciated everything you do is? God, I feel like a tool, y’know, _encouraging you_, literally at all, but… obviously there was something important about what you were doing, if you were doing it, right? I know you pretty well, dude, and you do stuff for reasons, even if they’re kinda stupid or like, totally pathologically fucked-up reasons.”

“Wouldn’t you do it, though? You heard my explanation. I didn’t just passively speculate about that future, I saw it, I _knew_ it. It was inevitable. Wouldn’t you do anything to avert that ending? That’s where meaninglessness is supposed to lead us. It’s a trolley, careening off its course, multi-track-fucking-drifting over everyone I’ve ever given a shit about. As long as there’s meaning, internal consistency, a defined trajectory from point A to point B, there’s the possibility of redemption, understanding, fixing shit, making shit work out the way it’s supposed to.”

For everyone but me. That was how it was supposed to work. I don’t have to show you my process - you don’t have to witness my fall from grace. Because I have no intention of doubling back on it. I don’t want to be understood. I don’t need that from you. Not from anyone but Rose, someday, when I let her See it all. I’m… let me just get a handle on myself, here.

Let me just remind myself who the fuck I am.

Clearly, I’m rattled from the whole business with Rose. She has a way of doing that, throwing me totally off-balance. That’s a good thing. She wouldn’t be worth trusting, worth depending on, if I couldn’t occasionally count on her to pull one over on me. Good bot, indeed. Got me in my feelings. Got me monologuing.

It doesn’t matter if, under John and Calliope’s guidance, this world is survivable and maybe pleasant, maybe conducive to some kind of pointless, nauseatingly maudlin personal growth. John and Roxy are getting haircuts together! Good for them. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change the basic, fundamental fact of this universe: that it’s bullshit. An unbalanced cherub’s disturbed-and-disturbing scribblings on the walls. Maybe he gets to dick around with it, now that he’s figured out how.

Maybe John would be a better God than me.

Well, he’s dead. Lord-English-venom’d out of relevance on a permanent basis. This is a shadow of him, an effigy, barely a person. The second I leave, I’m back to total narrative control. He’ll wake up to my shitty ex living in his guest room, in a world that will never, _never_ make sense. He’ll LARP normalcy for eternity in the face of the incomprehensible scale of his own meaninglessness.

And really, good for him. Glad he’s figured out a way to make it survivable. You’ll notice, John, since I know you’re listening, that I didn’t tell you what eventually happens to you, in the world where you don’t mystically get your shit sorted out. I figure you don’t want to know. There’s a reason I only planned to make one last visit, here. Why this was, and is, goodbye for us.

“Wow, can you hear yourself? That was a whole heap of bullshit, dude. I can’t even pick a specific line to repeat back in a Batman voice to make fun of you! No, actually, I think I’d go with the bit about LARPing normalcy. Hooooly shit, you realize that sounds totally nuts, right? ‘_He’ll LARP normalcy for eternity in the face of the incomprehensible scale of his own meaninglessness._’ That’s like, something a totally baked vampire would say to another vampire, and the not-high vampire is like ‘chill out, you’re blazed off your ass’.”

“I thought it was reasonably apt and descriptive,” I say, crossing my arms, back to sitting up straight.

“Haha, shut up, Dracula,” he says. “I’m not high enough for this!”

“That doesn’t make me wrong, Egbert. Congratulations, though. You had me going, there. Really got me for a second.”

“Aw. How can you be so morbid, on a day like this?”

“Easy. It’s not real.”

“Ughhhhh,” he sighs, flopping back on the picnic blanket, his hair falling into his face. He’s letting it get long. From this perspective, I can see just the suggestion of a mullet forming at the nape of his neck. Given his media preferences, I guess this was inevitable. “You’re impossible! I can’t believe I want to make out with you. Roxy thinks I’m an idiot - I’m not sure she even really believes me, but I figure it’s only a matter of time before -”

“_What_?” I interject, aghast all over again. “You told _Roxy_ about me?”

“Uh, yeah, why wouldn’t I? We were married for like a decade, bro, I would have told her way earlier if I remembered it. I told you Jake lives with me now, right? It’s easier to… remember stuff, and hold onto stuff, and like, figure things out, when he’s around. Even though it’s really fucking hard to get the guy to wear a shirt, I’m like, holy shit, dude, we’re the same size, you can have one of mine, and he’s all ‘pish posh’ - oh, hold on, I didn’t get the accent right, let me just…”

He clears his throat, and I cut in to prevent this from getting any more unendurably stupid.

“You told Roxy.”

“Yeah? I thought you guys were like, best friends? She was being all sad about you being dead - I mean, she gets like that, around the anniversary, and it used to kind of bug me, since half the time she acted like she didn’t even remember you existed, and it just seemed like total bullshit, y’know? But lately I’ve been trying to cut her more slack, since it was fucking traumatic enough for me, I bet I’d be just as weirdly fucked up about it if it’d been, like, Rose, y’know, someone who’d been one of my only friends for basically as long as I can remember. I dunno.”

“It’s complicated,” I say shortly.

“Oh.”

I don’t know exactly why it makes my heart feel constricted in my chest, the idea of them talking about me. Partially, I think, because I can’t picture even remotely how that conversation would go. I don’t have a dynamic mental image of Roxy, in this or any universe. I’ve never been able to predict what he’ll do next. I’ve contemplated this subject before. I don’t get him. Usually that’s something I’m used to, something that I can accept.

In this context, I just don’t like it. I cross my arms more securely around my ribcage.

“Well, that kind of puts a damper on things, my bad,” John says, shrugging and tossing his hair out of his face, almost certainly summoning the breeze that sweeps it into something resembling order. I’ve actually never seen it this long. At this length, it takes on a gentle curl, soft and leaning brunet rather than purely black. “I had a load of great plans! We were going to watch the clouds, it was going to be super romantic, I was going to make them say ‘god villains are kind of hot, actually’ and you were going to laugh, and then we were going to kiss, and you were going to be like ‘whoa, Egbert, what happened, you sure have this figured out’.”

“Whoa, Egbert, what happened, you sure have this figured out,” I say flatly, and he lapses into a fit of laughter.

“Yeah! Like that! Ha, the best laid plans…”

I was expecting something different, too, to be completely fair. I didn’t expect him to get better. I didn’t expect him to be happy, either. Ever. I guess if a guy completely abdicates his responsibilities, just cops the fuck out in the face of -

“Can we not, right now? I mean, if it makes you feel better, you can talk about whatever you want, obviously, but why don’t you just… lay back? It’s not too late to watch the clouds, dude. Might be kiiiiinda nice.”

I frown down at him.

“Make me,” I say quietly.

“You’re so weird. C’mon, asshole, lay down.”

With a sigh of what might be easily mistaken for relief, I lay back on the blanket, a few inches away from him, close enough to hear him breathing.

“Maybe I did totally abdicate some stuff. I mean, maybe it was my cosmic role to make this universe as shitty as possible. Fucking that up kinda sounds like something I would do,” he sighs.

I ignore him and watch the clouds. One looks like a horse. He notices me staring, and chuckles, wiggling his fingers up at the skyscape and animating it, elongating the cirrus tendrils of the mane and bringing the delicate legs up and back and together in a reasonable facsimile of a gallop.

“Bravo,” I say.

“I know my audience,” he replies, elbowing me in the ribs.

“Asshole.”

“You like it.”

The sun is golden and warm on my face, and I roll slightly over to watch him, more to shield my unshaded eyes from it than anything. He’s grinning up like an idiot, not paying any attention to me.

“Okay, check this one out,” he insists, and I glance back up obligingly to see that he’s got two more horses running in a small herd, one of which is a somewhat misshapen baby horse.

“You’re an artist, Egbert.”

“Impressive enough to distract you from your internal monologue?”

“If I _am_ distracted from my divine-fucking-purpose, it’s entirely by my own sheer force of will, and has absolutely nothing to do with your sky-horse puppet show.”

“Shit, right, you like puppets, too! Hold on, I can do some smuppets - you like those, right, I’m not making that up? I know they were like, a whole _thing_ with Dave’s bro, but that’s not really you, is it?”

“Not really,” I say.

I do think they’re pretty cool. Just, like, artistically speaking, from the perspective of an objective and critical aesthete.

“Hell yeah, let’s get some smuppets going up in the stratosphere!”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say I was being seduced.”

“Aw, are you not seduced by this?”

“Doing nice things for me is a losing strategy.” Look, I’m being self-aware. “I don’t respond to nice.”

He pouts exaggeratedly, withdrawing his narrative-slash-wind-related control from the clouds for a second. The horses stop galloping, the smuppets begin to deform under the influence of the natural air currents miles overhead.

“I don’t think people have been nice to you that often, dude. Maybe you’d like it if you tried it.”

“That’s not true,” I argue. “Don’t shit on my friends.”

“I don’t think you _let_ people treat you very well, Dirk. I mean, to circle back to Jake, uh, I think he’d have done anything for you. Basically anything he thought you wanted. Like, you gave him a lot of shit, even in the candyverse, and he still… he still loves you, so much. I’ll admit, I was expecting some weird shit, after everything we’ve, uh, talked about, but… yeah, he’s a weird dude, but aren’t we all kind of weird dudes, when you think about it for more than like half a second?”

“That’s his thing,” I sigh. “Once he decides he loves someone. He doesn’t know any better.”

“You tried to convince him he didn’t.”

I snort exaggeratedly.

“Everything I did with Jake, I did because he was into it.”

“It’s just possible to like, self-harm with that kind of stuff, y’know?”

“Christ, Egbert, when did you start talking like a first-year psych student on a power trip? How much have you been hanging out with fake Rose?”

“C’mon, dude, am I wrong?”

“I’m not responding to that.”

“Fine. You don’t have to. I just wanted to… I dunno, I think you should know, it’d kinda suck if I didn’t tell you, since you’ve got such a fucked-up view of, uh, what you guys had going on. He loved you. For real. That’s just, like, fair to say.”

“Wow, I’ve got to say, as far as seductions go, this one really isn’t impressing me much.”

“Aw, fuck off. I already know you’re into me.”

He looks over, flutters his eyelashes, and lapses back into laughter as I glare at him. Admittedly, without the shades, it _is_ a lot easier to indicate my complete disapproval.

“This isn’t what I want,” I say.

“Oh, sorry,” he says. “I guess I don’t know how much time passed on your end, if you’re like… I dunno, if this isn’t your deal anymore, just say the word, seriously.”

“No, jackass, I just mean…”

This was never my deal. Butterflies and fluffy little clouds and grand romantic gestures and a homemade fucking cake and a warm day and a - it’s not right. It’s as fucked up as the rest of this universe. As fucked up as someone _wanting_ to share this kind of thing with me in the first place. This isn’t where I belong. I don’t fit into this fantasy.

Just the fact that this is where and how he could conceivably want me makes it obvious that he doesn’t _get_ me, which is a stupid thing to be disappointed over - come on, John Egbert, _getting_ something other than a tragic tooth-to-the-abdomen related dismissal from any narrative importance whatsoever?

“Haha, ouch,” he laughs.

“Search your feelings. You know it to be true.”

“Aw, come on, dude, don’t reject me with Star Wars quotes, that’s just gauche as fuck. Tell it to me straight!”

“Anywhere else,” I finally say. “Anywhere but here.”

“Hm. You like weird stuff, right? And I’m totally well-adjusted enough for some weird stuff, now. Let’s do it. Let’s make it happen! Hold on.”

He stands, furrowing his brow, silhouetted against the sun in apparently intense concentration. The brilliant sunlight from overhead is the last thing to disappear as the world’s colors run into each other, the sounds of wind and water and rustling grass disappear, the boundaries of reality transition into smooth white walls, interspersed with stained glass windows in a style I don’t recognize.

It’s raining. Hard. The only source of light, here, is a series of fixtures set overhead, and a few in sconces dotted along the walls. I’m still half-laying on the ground, but it’s transformed to a thin red layer of carpeting.

His expression is incredibly smug.

“Weird enough for you?”

“Uh, where are we?”

“Your funeral, asshole!”

The isolated images resolve into a church. Rows of pews. I’m half-reclined in the aisle, and when I sit up, I can see the two coffins, one much smaller than the other, set on a raised plinth at the front of the house of worship.

I sigh in relief. Yeah, this is more what I was going for.

John takes an overdramatic bow. He’s wearing an overstarched suit, black tie and all, mourner-chic. Looking down, I’m in essentially the same attire. Alright, I’ll give him this one. Exactly my kind of fucked up.

“Bluh, okay, if you’re done ogling, I have to get this thing off. Ties are awful!”

“Be my guest,” I say, standing, stretching, and taking a moment to look over at the coffin. It’s extremely nice. Excessively nice, for something going in the dirt. Roxy picked it out. I’m reasonably sure that the hardware is solid gold.

He strips off his tie and begins to unbutton his dress shirt, but for my part, I approach the two caskets, the larger of them awkwardly propped open by an excess of shitty swords. About a million years ago, I told Roxy he - she, then, I guess - would have to make arrangements for my swords, if she wanted to be in charge of burying me when the time came. It was sort of a joke. Here they are.

At this point, their timeline wasn’t more than a cosmic microsecond away from truth and reality. He would have remembered in mine, too. It’s just too confusing to think about. All of it. What the fuck has he ever been thinking?

I turn to the smaller of the two and pry open the lid.

She left my shades on. John forgot to re-appear them for me, or just deliberately decided not to let me have them, so I lean in and take them off my bloodless disembodied head.

He looks peaceful, a little wan and ashy with blood loss and exhaustion, a pretty authentic reproduction of where I was at this point in the story. But like he’s managed to fall asleep - always a struggle, honestly - and wherever he is, he’s actually at rest. It’s a recurring thing with dead Dirks. They look happier than alive ones.

John joins me beside the casket, peering in awkwardly to see what I’m doing. I put my shades on before he can glance over at my face, and he sighs dramatically.

“Ew, corpse shades.”

“Fuck off, Egbert, you didn’t let me keep mine, I had to improvise.”

“Mhm, sure, bold words from the guy who’s toooootally not into corpses, but also took the first chance he could get to put his alive-hands all over some dead flesh, huh?”

“Thanks, John, everybody needed that connection made explicit. If anything, that’s selfcest, not necrophilia, you fucking pervert.”

“I live to serve!” he declares, grinning.

“And you’re enjoying this as much as I am.”

“Aw, I just like to see you comfortable.” His smile doesn’t waver even slightly. He steps forward - I cross my arms and step back, my hip pressing up against the other half of my coffin. Backed into a corner yet again. What _ever_ shall I do?

“Well?” I demand. “Comfortable as I’m ever going to be. What are you going to do about it, Egbert?”

“You’re really into the weird porn dialogue, huh,” he observes, and my mask of complete disaffection remains unmoved.

“And what about it?”

“Ugh, you’re lucky you’re cute, that’s all.”

_Cute_?

I don’t have a lot of time to get either annoyed - like, probably, I’d be annoyed - or catch the fucking dokis or whatever over that appellation, because he picks me up by the ass and sets me down on top of my casket for easier access and presses his lips to mine.

And yes, since I know the question on everyone’s minds, it’s good. Really good. He’s been practicing with his hand, I bet. Fuck if it didn’t work.

“Well yeah, duh,” he says, breaking away to smile at me. “I’ve seen movies, I can figure my own shit out with a little guidance!”

He’s back to crushing me against him, one hand in my hair, the other steadying my by my lower back, before I can respond. Really, just the right amount of tongue action going on. I could definitely be doing a better job of describing this. Hold on. We’re going out in a blaze of glory, best fucking believe I’m going to do right by you motherfuckers.

While I’m propped up against the mahogany lid, more or less, I’ve got my legs folded behind his back, supporting a non-negligible fraction of my own weight. He runs his fingers through my hair almost carelessly, closing his hand into a fist once he’s carded deep into it. I couldn’t break out of his grip if I tried.

His lips are soft and warm on mine. He smells like freshly laundered cotton, like sheets drying in the sun, and a little like an orchid hothouse, floral in a way that’s kind of surprising, but fits him, weirdly. He chuckles into my mouth as I think that, parting my lips, his tongue meeting mine gently, curious rather than like he’s hellbent on colonizing my fucking mouth.

“You’re a pretty good writer, actually,” he mumbles, smiling against my lips as I awkwardly try to keep kissing him, though he pulls me back by half an inch, not letting me touch him anymore. “This is kind of fun! Keep narrating. Focus on what’s happening, okay?”

That’s an order, and the thrill of complying with it runs up my spine, warms my body, starting from my chest and radiating outwards, like a swallow of hot tea, caffeinated buzz and all. He laughs again, and relaxes his grip, allowing me to press forward hungrily, latching onto his lower lip with my teeth.

“Son of a bitch,” he says, pressing me back against the coffin lid, breathing heavily and worrying at his lip with his tongue. I didn’t draw blood - I’m polite like that - but it’s swollen and reddened. He twines his fingers further up from the base of my skull, holding me there against the cool, polished wood, back arched against the shape of it, like he’s not completely sure what to do with me.

“Come on,” I insist. “I won’t fucking break.”

He laughs like he knows something I don’t, which is astronomically unlikely, then leans over me, catching my neck with his teeth. I gasp, even though I really should have seen that coming, and he licks at the sore spot, then bites me again. Harder, this time. I squirm against him, but his body is pinning me almost completely in place. The coffin creaks against the combined weight of me, him, and four-fifths of my corpse.

My throat feels cool and slick over the deep, aching burn of what would definitely make for some impressive bruises, if this was my real body. He’s not holding back. Thank fuck. He’s not holding anything back. It’s overwhelming, his hips grinding against mine, his teeth in my neck. I’m a stoic son of a bitch, and anyone who’s told you otherwise was fucking with you, but I can feel an uncharacteristically uncontrolled whine building in my chest, and I struggle harder against his grip, diverting my attention before I do something embarrassing.

“You okay?” he asks, looking up at me with concern.

I hate that expression. I hate that he’s fucking _worrying_ about me, in the middle of all of this, when that’s the last thing he should be doing.

“I feel like a broken record, here,” I hiss. “Get on with it!”

“Heh, alright! Tell me if you don’t like anything, though!”

He phrases it as a sincere command, and it weighs down my metanarrative wrists like a set of heavy manacles. Motherfucker.

“Motherfucker,” I say aloud, in case he wasn’t paying attention.

“Shh, shut up, Dirk,” he says fondly. “But, uh, don’t let that get in the way of telling me if you’re not into something, okay?”

I kiss him hard enough that our teeth click together until he resumes steering me with my hair, sighing as though I’ve personally offended him, back to gently pressing his tongue to my lips until I part them and lean back. He deepens the kiss, this time, barely giving me the chance to inhale, leaving me breathless and panting unflatteringly when he draws away.

“Remember last time?” he murmurs, kissing sloppily at my earlobe, dipping down to nip at the taut skin of my neck, making me shiver against his grip. “Tell me to fuck off now, or get on your knees.”

He releases my head, and as I slide down the smooth coffin, he lowers me carefully by the curve of my back.

“So I take it that’s a ‘still into that’, then,” he chuckles, then chokes on his laughter as I pull his belt out of his belt loops in a single, fluid motion, tossing it so it hangs draped over my casket, and unbutton his slacks. “Wow, that was fast - ahhhh - okay, so you’ve done this before, nice.”

No, not my first time, Egbert. The hell kind of blushing virgin do you take me for? I get his fly open and leave his pants where they are, hanging open around his strikingly erect dick, the fabric of his boxers - navy blue, very staid, appropriate for a funeral, obviously - not doing all that much to contain it. I don’t bother with the underwear situation, just look up at him expectantly.

“Oh, right,” he says. “Suck my dick. Ech. Fuck, that sounds really -”

Before he can weigh in on the appropriateness of the phrasing or whatever the fuck - please, for the love of all that’s good, do not talk about linguistics with your dick in my mouth, John - I press my tongue to the head of his dick, through the thin fabric of his shorts, and wrap my lips delicately around him, waiting for his reaction.

He doesn’t disappoint. His hips twitch, pushing back against my mouth, and he groans as I flick my tongue against him, through the damp fabric, then tighten my grip and begin to suck. Swimming with the narrative current, it feels like taking off a pair of uncomfortable work boots after a long day, a flood of endorphins, pure relief.

“Hold on,” he interrupts, and I actually do whine, now, so consider yourself privy to that information, I guess, as he hauls me bodily off his dick and shoves his boxers down. “Alright. Shit.”

It’s a nice dick. I should probably describe his dick, but ‘nice’ as an adjective really suffices. Fits down my throat, with some effort and finagling. It’d be a real challenge for a lesser man. He lets me take the lead, which I can’t bring myself to mind, since my mouth is practically moving of its own volition. I’m on cloud fuckin’ nine, complying easily when he whispers suggestions, barely feeling his hand back in my hair as anything but the warmth of contact.

“Let me see,” he murmurs, and I feel him lift the shades from my face. I suppose a man’s got to get his ahegao one way or another, though he groans for a reason entirely distinct from gratification as I think that.

“You’re the - ahhh - you’re the worst,” he tells me, cutting himself off as I swallow appreciatively around him. Talk more, come on. “Hey, who’s giving the orders, here?”

I push him deeper into my throat, and he chokes again.

“Fine! Fuck, you’re good at that, that, uh, feels really good?” he says awkwardly, and I fix him with my best watery-eyed glare and flick him reproachfully in the thigh. “Ow! What, do you want me to say it’s _not_ good? I’m not gonna lie to you, dude!”

I roll my eyes exaggeratedly, and make sure to think about biting him loudly enough that he overhears.

“Don’t - god, don’t you dare! You’re a real asshole sometimes, you know that? Aaaaand that’s what you wanted, isn’t it.” He tightens his grip until I can really feel it. “You want me to like, call you a slut and whatever, right? That’s a thing.”

If I was in a position where I could nod without pausing in my blowjob related activities and incurring a harsh narrative penalty, suffice to say, I would.

“Well, I’m not going to do that,” he says, a bit breathlessly as I pick up speed in anticipation. “I don’t think any of that stuff about you. You’re… ah, you’re really cool, like _so_ cool, and I think sometimes I wish I _was_ you, sort of, or something? You’re so much better at all of this stuff. I really like you, okay? You’re funny, and you don’t let me get away with dumb shit, and I know I said Jake was the one that helped me, but it was you first, before anyone else… without you, I don’t think I ever would have figured it out… I don’t really think you’re a bad person, even though you’ve done insane and kind of awful things, I really think you were trying to help. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. And I - I get it, okay? You have… a good heart. I wouldn’t, ah, fuck, I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it! God and fuck all of that, you’re so fucking hot, holy shit, holy fuck, stop, stop stopstopstop I’m going to -”

I pull back in time for him to regain control over himself, wiping my face dry with the arm of my unpleasantly starchy suit jacket.

While he’s catching his breath, I take a moment to shuck it off, to unbutton half the buttons on the dress shirt beneath it, and to take the pair of suspiciously fancy cufflinks off my wrists, setting them free. I’m beginning to suspect that these are the clothes I was buried in. Appropriately fucked up.

“So,” I say hoarsely. “What part of ‘yeah, I want you to like, call me a slut or whatever’ was confusing for you?”

He dissolves into laughter all over again, leaning in to ruffle my hair.

“Aw, you’re cute. I just told you, I don’t want to!”

“Yeah, I could tell. I nearly had to tap the fuck out. Nix the cloying bullshit, okay? I don’t have a praise kink, fuck off with that.”

“Could’ve fooled me!” he retorts cheerfully. “Alright, how do you want to do this?”

“Bend me over the coffin, fuck me till I cry.”

He swallows audibly.

“That’s, uh, all?”

“What, d’you want me to write you some tasteful first-person erotica? Scratch that, that was definitely a thing you and Roxy tried when the marriage was failing. Don’t want to reawaken old memories.”

At this, he tugs at his collar, flushing luminously red.

“And just to be clear, I don’t want you to touch me. I want you to fuck me. I can handle myself. Capiche?”

“Fine. Whatever you want. But on my terms, okay? Hit the coffin twice -” he pauses and demonstrates with two firm strikes to the lid “-and I’ll stop. You _will_ tap out if you want to stop. And you can’t whine at me for being nice to you. Deal?”

“I can whine about whatever I want to whine about, but you can issue a blanket ‘shut up, Dirk’ ordinance.”

“Deal. Anything else I should know?”

I falter, here, for a split second. He draws his brows together in concern. This whole stop-and-negotiate fuckery is kind of hilarious, given that his dick is still pressing against the seam of his dress pants, hard.

“Please,” I say quietly, then turn away from him and drape myself, prone, over my own coffin. A stellar view of the jumble of swords sticking out of it. From behind me, he draws a shuddering breath.

“I… okay, it’s just kind of like…” he leans over me, still clothed, the buttons of his shirt pressing into my back. “Are you even hard? No offense, obviously, but if you’re not enjoying -”

His hand traces over my hipbone, skates inward, his arm locked around my waist. I twist away before he can grope at me like an idiot. There’s plenty of shit I’m not going to explain to John Egbert. Shit I haven’t had to talk through with a person in about a decade, and I’m not going to resume doing so now. Not if I don’t have to.

“I thought I _said_ not to touch me,” I snarl, tensing to full-body rigidity. “Fucking trust me. I’m into it. Just do it already. Stop fucking around.”

“Sorry!” he says, jerking away. “Got it, my bad!”

He strokes my hair soothingly, rubs my back, though he moves his attention down to my ass almost immediately. Can’t blame him. It’s a fun body part. And I do relax into it, once it becomes clear that he’s not going to push the issue. He really… doesn’t want to mess with me. I kind of appreciate it, actually, as viscerally unsettling as all the tenderness going on here is.

Like any weird shit, I can take it. There’s a hot, hard dick pressed against me, and all is right in the world, even though the motherfucker it’s attached to won’t stop mouthing at my ear, the place where my skull lapses into my neck, and it’s making my breath hitch and my hips stutter, like a little bitch.

“You’re not a little bitch,” he says softly, lips moving against my throat.

“Shut the hell up and fuck me,” I argue, very eloquently.

“Why?”

“_Why_?” I echo mockingly. “Do I have to spell it out for you? You have a child, for fuck’s sake, I know you’ve done it at least once! And coincidentally, I’ve _met_ Roxy Lalonde, so call that an extreme fucking lowball estimate.”

“Tell me why you want this,” he says, low, but insistent.

“I can’t -” I choke on the words, and they turn insistent in my throat, pouring out too quickly under his orders. “I keep telling you. Trying to tell you. I can’t take a second longer in my own head. I don’t want to think anymore. Distract me. Make it stop.”

“Easy!” he says, though there’s no smile to it. Pure command. “Stop thinking. Just feel.”

I… really should have thought of that.

He goes back to kissing me, wet heat against my neck, a hand kneading at my ass. He solicits my help in fumbling my pants off, tossing them aside. From what I can feel, he leaves his on. Interminable cool, slick ministrations. The heat and pressure of being entered, gradually, carefully. A heavy, heady sense of being filled. I go completely lax, my face pressed against the glossy surface of my own coffin.

While I’m definitely making noises, he’s starting to move and fuck, fuck, it feels perfect, warm in a way that I didn’t know I was missing, foreign and full and distractingly pleasant, at intervals, I can’t hear myself, muffled through layers of cotton. It’s just good.

He braces me with his forearm to keep my face from slamming into the coffin lid. The hot, tight, wound-up feeling in the core of me takes on a rhythmic character. His other hand is steadying me by the hip, rubbing in slow circles in time with his thrusts. For once, I don’t weigh in. I don’t try to dissect the moment. It feels like I could live in this brief interval of nonexistence.

It feels like it will last forever. I know it won’t.

I already miss it. I already miss him.

Who else could love me like this? Who else could understand -

“Stop it,” he murmurs. “I told you to stop thinking.”

A soft thumb wipes a tear from the dip of my orbital socket, and I feel it, and I feel him, and I feel my lips part, and I feel

I feel

I feel

I feel

He rocks against me. I move with him. My body, ten inches away, through a thick slab of mahogany, wreathed in swords, decays. I’ve never felt more alive.

Our pace turns stuttery and disjointed. His teeth sink into my shoulder. I gasp and shudder along with him. It’s hot and wet and all I need. All I’ve ever needed. Quiet. Peaceful, in his arms. Hands that dry me with what might be a discarded jacket, that hold me once they’re done.

“Tell me how you’re doing,” he says, and the fog clears.

“Good,” I whisper, in the second before it all comes flooding back, everything I actually am, everything I’ve actually done, everything it costs, to hold the fate of the multiverse in my hands.

Then I sob, once, deep in my chest, and bury my face in his shirt. For a long time. For a millisecond. For an eternity. Time isn’t fucking real. This isn’t real. He isn’t real. It’s just me. It’s only ever been me. A pathetic piece of shit, as omniscient as anyone has ever been, as close to God as anyone can be. Alone in my hallucination. I need to pull my shit together. I need to get back to what matters. This doesn’t matter. It’s fake.

In reality, I don’t get to feel like this.

It’s weak, and it’s fucking selfish, to let go of what I am for even a fraction of a fraction of a subunit of what remains of my existence. Rose was right. I’m pathetic. Too weak to face what I forced her to accept or die when I put her in that hunk of metal. That we’re not human anymore. That we don’t get to be human. We’re something greater, yeah, but at a cost. Always at a cost. And here I am, trying to play both parts. Isn’t that what I’ve been doing here all along?

I’m the one who’s LARPing normalcy.

I’m the one who’s faking it.

“Okay, heavy stuff,” John says quietly. “Do you want to talk about it? I won’t force you, I promise.”

“No,” I say. “I need to go back.”

“I’m never going to see you again, once you leave,” he says.

“Right in one. Prize goes to the gentleman in the sweaty button-up.”

He laughs. The sound reverberates through his chest, vibrates in my bones. We’ve ended up on the carpeted floor, somehow, the vaulted ceiling of the church looming far overhead. I’m resting supine on his chest, gazing up into the rafters. White and sterile, drawing the eye up to - why does Earth C even have houses of worship, with all of its gods alive to hold court?

“Dude, we didn’t show up for literal thousands of years. Of course they were going to come up with organized religion during the wait, duh.”

“Right.”

Sometimes I forget about that. Just how much world exists outside of us. Collateral damage. So many universes worth of collateral damage already scorched away to nothing. I remember it, from a thousand perspectives, a thousand frantic flights from death. That’s what I inherited from Bro, as much as anything. Motherfucker wanted to live. Wanted everyone to live, but especially himself. That’s how I know we’re not all the way alike, in the end.

He holds me closer to him, wraps his arms around me, like he’s about to phagocytotically devour me, just open up his ribcage and swallow me whole.

“Ew, don’t make me part of your weird vore fantasy, asshole,” he complains.

“Don’t like it, don’t listen to my internal monologue.”

“I don’t know how to stop anymore.”

“Wish I could help with that. Unfortunately for you, this bitch who lives in my head has a lot of vitally important shit to elucidate.”

“If you say so,” he sighs.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“No. That’s the point. It’s inherent to us, ‘not being okay’. Under tension, a strand of spidersilk has a tensile strength equal to spun steel. Unmoored, it’s worthless. It’ll deform in a strong wind, decay like anything else. Like the corpse in this fucking box. Like you, like everyone here in this universe.”

“I feel like it’s not helping when I tell you you’re spouting nonsense, but you’re kind of spouting nonsense again.”

He’s right, of course. It’s not going to help. It’s not going to stop me. He can’t stop me.

The weirdly fleecy red carpet beneath us blurs back into the checkerboard pattern, and we’re back on the park lawn, the sun shining down on us, the soft grass turning the picnic blanket pillowy and soft. He sets me down gently on it, and I set about shuffling my hair back in order, straightening my clothes, which are comfortable linen outerwear again. He watches in silence.

“Can you promise me something?” he says.

“No.”

“Aw, at least you’re honest. Fine, promise you’ll remember something, at least.”

“I actively know everything.”

“Perfect.” He laughs, though the sound is more subdued than his familiar chuckle. “Uh, I’m not omniscient, but sometimes our deal overlaps, right?”

“Right,” I agree.

“Well, someday, maybe you’ll have a choice. I get that you think you don’t right now. I can’t, like, convince you that you do. Hell, I had to get Hope-roofied by my ectodad to even partially figure that out, and I’m still… figuring that out, that I can choose, that it wasn’t all just meat or candy, that it’s me, too, and what I do. Right?”

“Fuck, Egbert, planning on getting to a point any time soon, or are we in level topographic territory, here, because I’m starting to get the impression that there’s no gradient to the terrain for miles, that this ‘point’ of yours might be a big pile of bullshit.”

“You really know how to make a guy feel appreciated, huh, Dirk?”

The apology dies on my lips. I don’t apologize.

Would you respect me if I did?

“I respect you a lot,” he says, frowning.

I wasn’t talking to him.

“Geez, fine. I just want you to look for the choice, instead of just acting like all your stupid misery is inevitable! Really hypocritical, coming from me, but… I chose this, once, and now I get to live. And I got to have this, with you. And the world worked out okay, in the end. Not everything has to hurt, is what I’m saying.”

He toys with the long hair curling at the nape of his neck.

“You can choose to be something else, I think. I’m kinda working on it myself.”

“Thanks for the insight, Epicurus.”

“Aw, you’re welcome, buddy.”

I find my shades folded in the front pocket of my shirt, and flick them on, but not before I ensure that he sees me roll my eyes, directly in his line of vision. He snickers. Everything’s back to normal. The circle of stupidity is complete.

“One more thing,” he adds, and I sigh heavily as he digs around in his picnic basket, pressing something small into my fist. “To remember me by, okay? Remember. You promised to remember.”

“Got me there,” I say.

“Okay, happy trails, space cowboy, or whatever they say in that one anime!”

“Egbert, you literal piece of shit, that’s the worst I’ve ever heard anyone fucking mutilate Cowboy Bebop,” I snap.

“Fine, then what is it, if you’re so smart?”

I cross my arms.

“See you, space cowboy.”

“Shit, well, the more you know!”

“I hate you. Thanks for that, I guess. Really reminds me what I’m not going to miss once I’m back in the universe where you don’t exist.”

“You’re so melodramatic! Honestly, you give Rose a real run for her money, sometimes, and she’s got a well-recorded penchant for the stuff!” he laughs. “But hey. Don’t get too worked up about any of this, right? It’s all a dream.”

“Yeah,” I say stiffly. “Just a dream.”

He leans in to kiss me, one last time, and it’s too much. The sunlight warming the back of my neck, his hand on my face, the slight give of his lips pressed to mine.

I disappear, and wake up in my room, cradling a cheaply-made Bro Strider body pillow. For a moment, I hold myself there, force myself to be present, really present, in a body that is meat, in a Self that is expansive beyond human reckoning.

Something digs into the palm of my hand, and I open my fist, finger by finger, my grip so fucking tense that they might as well all be glued together.

It’s a blue raspberry jolly rancher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this fic, and thank you for all of your comments and encouragement! I seriously had no idea that the response to this idea-that-got-wildly-out-of-hand would be so positive, and it's almost overwhelming; the Google doc where I've written all of this is literally titled 'Fuck it. Fuck it!', and has been since the incipience of Bad Loves Company. I just didn't expect it to work as well as it did.
> 
> I'm on Twitter at @0pacifica (sort of trying to do an HS-content Twitter I guess?) if you're interested, I talk a little bit about this and some other ongoing projects and I'm always interested in making new friends!
> 
> Illustration by the phenomenally talented [@1800redpop](https://twitter.com/1800redpop/status/1256698554531405824), a million thanks to Drowsy for their RIDICULOUSLY COOL ART.
> 
> Additionally: title and vague conceptual inspiration, plus just a great song. [[Bad Loves Company by deM AtlaS]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZG9qXlJ3A0)  
Chapter 5 title: [[By The Throat by Eyedea & Abilities]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr-C8iTJ25M)  
Chapter 3/4 titles: [[Handmade Handgun by P.O.S]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUky9WEkUcE)  
Chapter 2 title: [[Please Go by Four Fists]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bVU6Cz5f4g)  
Chapter 1 title: [[Burn Fetish by Eyedea & Abilities]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtxwAxYBoZ8)


	6. Epilogue

“Oh, so _that’s_ where my record player ended up,” John observes, crossing his arms as he stands awkwardly in the doorway to his backyard.

The garden is coming along… well, kind of great, actually. Almost _improbably_ so. Jake’s been at it for, what, a week? And already, he’s got actual little pumpkins on actual vines, flowers blooming, fat red strawberries hanging from a set of pots suspended from the eaves. Yeah, he’s no botanist, but this doesn’t seem all that biologically likely!

On a dusty chair from his mostly-unused dining room, John’s old hand-crank gramophone is spitting out more jazz that he doesn’t recognize. The decrepit thing probably hasn’t seen the sun in decades.

“Oops, hope you don’t mind too much that I took the liberty of bringing her out here with me!” Jake says, looking up from his weeding and smiling sheepishly. “It’s just such a lovely day, isn’t it?”

“They’re all lovely days, dude, we live on a paradise planet.”

“That’s no reason not to appreciate them, though, is it?”

“No,” he sighs. “I guess not. D’you want a glass of water or anything?”

As nice as the whole ‘beautify the backyard, and also the whole house, for some reason’ initiative is, it kind of makes him feel like a useless sack of shit, in a way that makes him itch to be less of a useless sack of shit, for once - which is better than the immobilizing kind of inadequacy, he supposes. It’s really hard to get down on himself properly while Jake-adjacent. That’s something he should probably be grateful for, though at the same time, it’s really nice to get away from the house and hang out with Roxy to do some whining every so often before reentering the sphere of relentless positivity and self-empowerment.

“If you’d be so good!” Jake replies with a dazzling grin.

“Ice?”

“And lots of it!”

“Gotcha.”

The windows in the kitchen - and all of the windows in the house - are flung open, and a crossbreeze keeps the sun-warmed air circulating, the scent of green and growing things sweet in the air. John sighs, filling a pitcher with ice from his fridge, sticking the whole thing in the sink and taking out a couple of glasses. It’s not like he’s got anything else to do this afternoon.

Jake is humming along appreciatively to the gramophone when he heads back out, beverages in hand.

“Thank you, dearest John!” he emotes, accepting the cold glass with apparent delight.

“Hey, uh, is there anything I can do to help with this whole… thing?” John offers, gesturing at the sprawling vegetable patch.

“Hm, I could certainly use a hand with the weeding! Determined little bastards. You know the difference between a weed and a vegetable, don’t you? Ha, nevermind, of course you do, you’ve a good head on your shoulders. If you’d be so kind as to start from that corner…”

“Cool,” John agrees, loping over to the indicated location and kneeling between the rows. Most of the weeds are tiny in contrast with the plants, not having had nearly as long to sprout or presumably having enjoyed the benefit of Jake’s… fucking… plant growth aura, or whatever the hell it is.

“So,” Jake says, after a long few minutes pass, in the pause that emerges when the gramophone slows and he has to take a moment to crank it afresh and get the thing going again. “Roxy tells me you’ve been hallucinating up our ol’ pal Dirk.”

“Hallucinating would be a word for it, yeah.”

“...are you quite alright, my friend?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he says, maybe-sorta defensively, but, like, how’s he supposed to react to that question, paired with that timing?

Jake laughs agreeably, which relaxes him just a hair.

“It’s never just a hallucination when it’s Dirk. That’s Strider 101, Johnny. That’s all.”

“Oh. Uh, I guess you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“All too well!” He laughs again, and it’s less the buoyant, bell-like noise from before. Heavier, sadder.

“Well, sorry that got back to you that way,” John says, shifting his shoulders in discomfort, making determined eye contact with a burgeoning pumpkin and no one else. “I, uh, I know that was, well, a thing you didn’t want to talk about. And equally much a thing I don’t, like, know how to talk about, at all, and probably convinced Roxy I was descending into some kind of psychosis, ha.”

Jake waves the thought away like he would a particularly troublesome fly.

“Don’t worry about it for a second, my dear! Time heals all things. I do wonder if that’s not why he was so prone to dispute its realness property. Haha, that’d just be too easy, wouldn’t it? Always doing things the most difficult way humanly possible.”

Oh, this is going to get uncomfortable. Like, stupid-uncomfortable. He pulls up a last little weed and exhales, steeling himself for how dumb this is all about to be.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Pretty much.”

“That’s why I ask, y’know. How you are. Because I, well, I’ve found… perhaps it was different for you. I very much hope that it was. We were awfully young. But it’s all too easy to… slip into his way of thinking, sometimes, he is awfully compelling and has such specific things that he… expects of people.”

“Yeeeeaaaah,” he says again, grimacing slightly. “Maybe, I guess. I dunno. I think I have a pretty solid idea of my own deal these days, even though I’m kinda still working on some parts of it. I get it, though, how that could have kind of sucked. And not gonna lie, it does make some of the stuff he mentioned, uh, make more sense, to think of it like that.”

Jake chuckles as though at the very thought of, well, anything that Dirk might have brought up, which John thinks is probably a fair reaction, if a bit of an _under_reaction.

“Glad to hear it,” he says, kneeling over a row of carrots and beginning to weed afresh. “Really, truly, I am. You’ve seemed so well of late, I’d hate for anything to… I don’t know. I ultimately didn’t wind up feeling… great about myself, I s’pose. Not that I didn’t love the absolute dickens out of him. Not that I don’t to this day.”

A silence settles around them, though it fails to be an utterly intolerable one. Birds warble in the trees, a gentle breeze rustles in the grass. Somewhere in the distance, children are playing some kind of game that involves a fairly extensive amount of shouting, and the sound carries down the empty cul-de-sac.

“How was he?” Jake asks quietly.

“Not good,” John says honestly. “Kind of stuck, I think. In the part right around where he killed himself. Y’know? Just sort of stuck there, was the vibe I got.”

Jake nods soberly.

“That’s a shame.”

In the absence of any real response to that, John half-nods, half-shrugs.

“I can’t help but notice your use of the past tense,” Jake adds. “It’s all over and done with, then, tucked back in the box for good?”

He nods again.

“Moving on was never his strong suit, John. I have no doubt that you were good for him, in that regard.”

“Uh, what?”

“I think we could all stand to learn a little something from you, at the very least. You’ve always been so much your own person, in the end. I admire that about you, do you know that? So very capable of blazing your own trail, making your own destiny and all that.”

“Pffft, yeah, I blazed the shit out of the trail between my bed and my fridge for a solid half a decade, dude. You don’t have to gas me up or anything, I’m actually fine.”

“John,” he says reproachfully. “You’re a model of heroism in many ways, but not so much when it comes to listening to other people, ever. Do let me finish, won’t you? To come back from such a state isn’t something most people are equipped to do. It takes tremendous strength of character to pull oneself up by their bootstraps - really, have you ever tried to pull yourself up by your bootstraps with your feet in your boots? It’s not actually possible! What a ridiculous thing to suggest that someone do! And yet, you went and did it, didn’t you? It’s so easy to be content with the worst of the world, but you’ve come around to a version of it that’s quite survivable, haven’t you?”

He pauses to look around, the sun slanting to his face. The sky has been clear of warships and drones for weeks, now, with the rebels and the government at the negotiating table. Rose snapped him a picture of Karkat signing the armistice agreement. Roxy has been talking about getting back in touch with Jane, to see if there might be any mending that fence, what with some of the government’s drastic concessions regarding contracts with Crockercorp. He can’t bring himself to be really upset with them. It’s just kinda how Roxy is. He gets that, now, and he can accept it, when it’s not blown up to ridiculous proportions.

Of course old friends would want to find their way back to each other. Doesn’t he miss Dave like he’d miss one of his limbs?

But Jake’s right. It’s a decent world, now. All the more decent, knowing just how fucking awful it could have been. His ecto-dad is smiling up at him, bronzed and mustached and the model of middle-aged vigor, so completely and totally departed from that image Dirk left him with.

“Maybe,” he finally says. “But I actually think I owe a lot of that to you, honestly. I was still really messed up before you randomly moved in.”

“I don’t know, John. Don’t you think it’s a little funny, just how much our epiphanies have lined up? I think there’s something to be said about your enduring leadership. You may or may not have had a hand in leading us where we were - it’s really pointless to blame yourself, my good fellow, at this point it hardly matters - but you most certainly led us out. Me, at least. Alright? Surely you can’t deny that much, not with me sleeping in your guest room and wearing your shirts!”

“When I remind you,” he adds, a little grouchily, and Jake laughs again.

“Well, it puts my mind at rest, to see you come out of your… whatever it was with him, seeming so hale and hearty and emotionally stable,” Jake continues blithely. “And I have no doubt that, whatever dark place he was, you brought him somewhere at least incrementally better.”

“With my magic dick.”

“I mean, sure!” Jake snorts. “Heavens to betsy, John, you do have a way with words.”

“Ugh, I’m sorry for being a bitch. Seriously, thanks, dude, I appreciate the… whatever your thing is. It’s all mutual, okay? We all got here because we helped each other. I wish it didn’t take so long for us to figure it out.”

“Oh, balderdash. It took as long as it needed to take, and now here we are! Two fine fellows, living our best lives, hands in the earth, sun on the back of our necks. What more could we ask for?”

He shrugs, though he could probably think of a few things, if he tried.

“Really. Thanks, Jake. I’m glad you’re living with me.”

“Don’t thank me yet! I’m going through your closet tomorrow, we simply must get the dusty old thing cleaned up! It’s a new life for us, Johnny boy, I’m not going to let any stone go unturned in the quest to get our lives all sorted out and bettered!”

“No, please, anything but that,” he groans. “You’re not going to need me around for like, moral support, are you?”

“Well, don’t you want to have some say over the fate of your clothing?”

“Noooo, just leave it, honestly! Let it rot there.”

“Hm. No can do, sport.”

“I changed my mind. Get the fuck out of my house.”

Jake pouts at him for a solid five seconds before they both burst into helpless laughter.

“Imagine,” he adds, wiping a tear from his eye. “Fine, go ahead, how am I going to stop you? Seriously, what am I going to do, leverage my weird metanarrative whatever-the-fuck to keep you from throwing out my shitty clothes? Do your worst.”

“Ah, and another thing that’s sure to boil your milk, as it were, I invited Jade over for dinner tomorrow. She’s bringing sweet potato casserole. We shall have to roast some of these gourds and possibly make a nice salad.”

He frowns. “Are you guys talking again?”

“Of course! Family is family.”

“Yeah, I know, but like. That was some bullshit, all that stuff that happened.”

“Family is often bullshit, in my experience,” Jake says, shrugging emotively. “But if we truly are to live forever, John, might as well start shoveling now, eh?”

“Right,” he says, staring down at the little pile of weeds that’s accumulated in his hands, his dirt-stained fingertips. “I guess.”

“There’s a good lad. Tavvy’s going to be so excited to see her, I’m sure. And, uh, one more thing, while I have you here.”

“Shoot,” he says. “Let me have it.”

“Do you think we might consider getting a dog? Janey always objected so vehemently to the idea, and I really can’t blame her, the mansion was so full of nice odds and ends and we were always away from home in that ship, no place for a rambunctious pup at all, but with this lovely yard… and, you know, it does a young man good, to have a source of unconditional love in his life that he might, well, respect slightly more than his tomfool of a father… it really might help dear Tav get a bit more steady on his own two feet, I think. To train a pup, to be responsible for a precious little life other than himself.”

“Huh. Totally not where I thought that was going, but sure.”

“Oh, really?” Jake brightens up visibly, if that’s even possible. He’s almost outshining the fucking sun, the light glinting off his bronzed shoulders turned whiteish and unearthly.

“Why not? Let’s get a dog. Wait, does Earth C have dogs? I’ve literally never thought about that. Wow. There’s a lot I don’t know about a world I’m ostensibly metatextually responsible for.”

“What fun! We shall simply have to figure it out. Perhaps Jade will have some thoughts? I’m excited just thinking about it.”

The gramophone is slowed critically enough to garble the few strains of jazzy piano that it can manage to eke out, and Jake pauses to give it another good crank. John returns to his weeding. It’s surprisingly cathartic, leaving the rows of black soil around the thick green vines and the sprouting heads of various sorts of lettuce clean and healthy-looking.

“I almost feel wretched, you know, for being so happy here,” Jake sighs. “S’pose I thought I’d be used to the whole survivor’s guilt dealio by now. Was he a brain ghost, for you? Just a ghost-ghost?”

Still stuck on the whole Dirk thing. Well, John can’t exactly blame him for that. Dirk’s an easy guy to get stuck on, in a weird and kind of fucked up way. Every conversation with him feels a hair’s breadth away from something arrestingly _true_, something that might be dangerously close to ‘figuring shit out, for real’, but just not quite there.

“You know how I was kind of going on about not being real?” he says with a sigh. “In the real… version of things, he’s alive. And he was just kind of checking in with me, on and off, for a while. That’s all.”

“Oh,” Jake says. “Oh, I guess that’s good. That he checked in.”

“Yeah.”

John suddenly becomes totally fascinated by the cold glass of water sweating beside him on the lawn, and Jake sighs, staring off into the middle distance, looking for all the world like some kind of Women’s Day cover heralding a feature about how hot it is when men perform basic household chores.

“It might be for the better, actually, that we’re in this one,” he finally says, setting his empty glass down and eyeing the pitcher.

“Really? You didn’t seem convinced of that before.”

“Things aren’t so great in reality, I don’t think. This is nice. Just chilling with my ectodad, pulling weeds, shooting the breeze about our weird mutual ex-something. Totally normal stuff happening in the Egbert-English household.”

Laughing all over again, Jake draws the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a slight streak of dirt behind.

“That doesn’t exactly sound like reality, does it. And yet, it is certainly a thing that we are doing. I’ll give you that.”

“Right? How fucking weird is this? Don’t get me wrong, I’m here for it, but this is weird, right?”

Jake shrugs.

“I don’t know, John. To be perfectly honest, things have always been rather weird. I think this is as real as we believe it is. P’rhaps that’s just the rambling of a fellow who’s always put rather a great deal of stock in hope, but while this isn’t quite the life I expected to have, it _is_, in the end, what I’ve always wanted. Just to be safe, here, for all of us to be safe, and happy, and to have someone to chat with while I’m tending to the ol’ garden. The rest is gravy. And don’t get me wrong, I do greatly enjoy the gravy! But I have needed this for such a very long time. And I must thank you for any part you’ve had in making it possible, whether or not I understand what’s happened.”

“Aw, Jake,” he says. “I have to hand it to you. You definitely don’t suck as much as I thought you did, and you’re even kind of cool, sometimes!”

“About as much as I can ask for,” he chuckles. “Go on, now, I can see you growing weary of all this. I’ll be in soon. Dear Tav’ll be home from school any moment, would you mind setting out a snack or somesuch for him?”

“One PB&J, coming up.”

“You’re a doll, John.”

“I’m a fucking martyr, dude!

“That too. Off you go.”

“Yes, _dad_,” he sighs, standing and feeling his blood pressure plummet, the golden sunlight swirling into starbursts in his vision, swaying on his feet.

“And why don’t you take your record player thingummy in? I’ll be doing the watering, in a moment, I don’t want it to get damaged or anything.”

The image of the back yard resolves once more into perfect clarity. The grass beneath the soles of his shoes. The sun, the birdsong, the wind ruffling his hair around the nape of his neck. Maybe he really will grow it out, properly, not by accident, just to see if he likes it. What’s stopping him, anyway? What’s ever been stopping him from… from getting a dog, from digging a garden, from stepping outside and enjoying the ambience of ‘not just wedged in the same fifteen-by-fifteen foot room all fucking day’? From… getting rid of all the shitty clothes he never wears, and maybe buying more, trying something new?

What the fuck is stopping him?

Nothing, anymore.

On the way back in, he brings the rotations of the record to a halt with the tip of his thumb and picks up the player, but finds himself whistling along even after the music has stopped. Huh.

Something in his chest seizes slightly as he glances back at Jake, at the garden. It’s been so easy. Everything has been so easy.

He wonders if Jake is right - if anything that went down between them actually helped Dirk at all. If anything’s going to get better for him. If he’s at least going to try. He hopes so. Hope has never really been his thing, but maybe he can learn. So far, so good, right? 

Yeah. So far, so good.

…

Paradox space stretches before you, vast and bleak as ever. Sparks of light dance around your titanium fingertips, registering as only minimal sensory input in contrast with the massive quantities of data flowing between your CPU and the ship’s as you navigate. Without a spatial objective, you are purposeless, flying blind, and you won’t be satisfied until you settle on a new planetary target. Identifying a few potentialities, you plot them dutifully and begin to calculate a course and a probability tree to guide in precedence-determination.

Quite abruptly, Dirk interrupts. You’ve been too absorbed in your task to monitor his movements, and he catches you very nearly off guard as he paces back onto the bridge, disheveled as before, though his hair has had time to dry (albeit into a chaotic tangle) and he’s standing a touch straighter. Not as entirely defeated as you remember, comparing the isolated image of your father at present with that which you most recently recorded. At least he seems to have gotten some sleep.

Per your internal atomic clock, it’s been only about twelve hours.

“Here,” he says shortly, setting a slip of paper down on the console.

“What is this?” you ask, completing the bulk of your processing work and reallocating some to the matter of scanning the document. You find only one entry, in characteristically orange ink, handwritten in spidery script. ‘Laugh’.

“I need a list,” he says. “Shit you want done. Fixed. Whatever. I know the laughter function blows, so I took the liberty of starting with that.”

“Oh.”

“And don’t bother with the fucking… you know, we both know the obvious shit, I think it’ll be a lot less fucking miserable if neither of us acknowledges the highly unnecessary reproductive function you so _desperately_ require. I’ll do it. All I ask in return is that you never bring it up again.”

“You’re an altruist,” you say, still struggling to process exactly what’s happened, here.

He laughs his acknowledgement of your surprise.

“I’m pulling my shit together. Shock of the motherfucking century, I know.”

“Well,” you say. “Regardless of the nigh-traumatic disturbance to my worldview this interaction has presented, I appreciate the thought and look forward to appreciating its execution. Thank you.”

He groans exaggeratedly, raking a hand through his hair, frowning when it snags. “I thought I said not to mention it.”

“It sounds as though we both have some personal growth to undergo, then, in the service of improved familial relations.”

“Guess the couples therapist-bot is my next project.”

“Shame, the timing on that. In certain iterations of reality, you could make a real killing on Earth C with that one. Hell. Might make about as much of a difference as the initiative at hand. Finally, a Strilonde collaboration that doesn’t end with either a geno- or sui- prefixed -cide.”

You settle on a final course, scanning the latest round of coordinates as recorded by the ship’s spatiotemporal hardware for any exceptions to your predicted viabilities, and turn in your seat to face him.

“_Are_ you alright?” you ask, before he can disappear again.

“I will be,” he says.

As he slips out through the port to the main body of the ship, you log a reminder to follow up on that within twelve hours, and turn back to the void of paradox space, illuminated dimly by the ambient light of your ship, traveling at warp speed, on the precipice of everything, of nothing at all. What happens next will depend not only on him, but on you.

It is agony, sharing yet not entirely grasping the fate of the universe in your chrome-plated hands. The loneliness of it as much as the weight.

For the first time in weeks, you feel him shift to take a fraction of the burden.

Charted before you, dim and barely visible with any sight but your Sight, a path stretches forward into the unknown. You press forward lightly on the throttle. The ship’s humming background ambience intensifies to a near-perfect A-minor.

“Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1,” you direct the console. “Begin with the Passacaglia.”

Music swells in tune with the engine’s steady drone, and you pick up the paper and recline in your seat, gazing thoughtfully at the empty space beneath the first entry.

The intercom crackles to life, a minute or two into your contemplations.

“Crank the volume up,” Dirk says flatly. “Let’s fuckin’ do this.”

You smile slightly as you oblige.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I briefly channeled Andrew Hussie and wrote the epilogue no one asked for. Thanks for the ride, everyone. I truly do appreciate your thoughts and your role in having made this an idea worth seeing through!


End file.
